Definitional Question Answering Task

A Definitional Question Answering Task is a question answering task whose input is a definition question and whose output is a textual definition.

• Context:
  • It can be solved by a Definitional Question Answering System (that implements a Definitional Question Answering Algorithm).
  • It can range from being a Domain-Specific Definitional Question Answering Task to being an Open-Domain Definitional Question Answering Task.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • DQAT(“What is a golden parachute?”) ⇒ A golden parachute is a package of economic value that is given to a terminated employee.
  • a GMRKB-based Definitional Question Answering Task.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Factoid QA.
  • a List QA.
• See: Definition Question Sentence, Definitional Sentence, Definitional Passage.

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References

2007

• (Yy, Le et al., 2007) ⇒ Hong Yu, Minsuk Lee, David Kaufman, John Ely, Jerome A Osheroff, George Hripcsak, and James Cimino. (2007). “Development, Implementation, and a Cognitive Evaluation of a Definitional Question Answering System for Physicians." In: Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 40(3). doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2007.03.002

2005

• (Lin & Dember-Fushman, 2005) ⇒ Jimmy Lin, and Dina Demner-Fushman. (2005). “Automatically evaluating answers to definition questions.” In: Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
• (Voorhees, 2005) ⇒ Ellen M. Voorhees. “Using Question Series To Evaluate Question Answering System Effectiveness.” In: Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
  • QUOTE: A definition question asks for interesting information about a particular person or thing such as Who is Vlad the Impaler? or What is a golden parachute?. …
    … Definition questions also require systems to locate information in multiple documents, but in this case the information of interest is much less crisply delineated.

2003

• (Xu, Licuanan & Weishedel, 2003) ⇒ Jinxi Xu, Ana Licuanan, and Ralph Weischedel. (2003). “Trec 2003 qa at bbn: Answering definitional questions.” In: Proceedings of TREC 2003.

2002

• (Ravichandran and Hovy, 2002) ⇒ Deepak Ravichandran, and Eduard Hovy. (2002). “Learning Surface Text Patterns for a Question Answering System.” In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002).

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