A System for Answering Non-Factoid Japanese Questions by Using Passage Retrieval Weighted Based on Type of Answer

We constructed a system for answering non-factoid Japanese questions. We used passage retrieval methods for the system. We extracted paragraphs based on terms from an input question and output them as the desired answer. We classified the non-factoid questions into six categories. We used a particular method for each category. For example, we increased the scores of paragraphs including the word “reason” for questions including the word “why.” We performed experiments using the NTCIR-6 QAC-4 data collection and tested the effectiveness of our methods.