Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Extracting relationships for a
question-answer system
In this section, we will examine an approach for extracting relationships that can be useful
for answering queries. Possible/candidate queries include:
•
Who is/was the 14th president of the United States?
•
What is the 1st president's home town?
•
When was Herbert Hoover president?
The process of answering these types of questions is not easy. We will demonstrate one ap-
proach to answer certain types of questions, but we will simplify many aspects of the pro-
cess. Even with these restrictions, we will find that the system responds well to the queries.
This process consists of several steps:
1. Finding word dependencies
2. Identifying the type of questions
3. Extracting its relevant components
4. Searching the answer
5. Presenting the answer
We will show the general framework to identify whether a question is of the types who,
what, when, or where. Next, we will investigate some of the issues required to answer the
"who" type questions.
To keep the example simple, we will restrict the questions to those relating to presidents of
the U.S.. A simple database of presidential facts will be used to look up the answer to a
question.
