Information Extraction Supported Question Answering

This paper discusses the use of our information extraction (IE) system, Textract, in the questionanswering (QA) track of the recently held TREC-8 tests. One of our major objectives is to examine how IE can help IR (Information Retrieval) in applications like QA. Our study shows: (i) IE can provide solid support for QA; (ii) low-level IE like Named Entity tagging is often a necessary component in handling most types of questions; (iii) a robust natural language shallow parser provides a structural basis for handling questions; (iv) high-level domain independent IE, i.e. extraction of multiple relationships and general events, is expected to bring about a breakthrough in QA.