Natural Language Based Reformulation Resource and Wide Exploitation for Question Answering

We describe and evaluate how a generalized natural language based reformulation resource in our TextMap question answering system improves web exploitation and answer pinpointing. The reformulation resource, which can be viewed as a clausal extension of WordNet, supports high-precision syntactic and semantic reformulations of questions and other sentences, as well as inferencing and answer generation. The paper shows in some detail how these reformulations can be used to overcome challenges and beneet from the advantages of using the Web.