The Role of Technical Terminology in Question Answering

Terminology is arguably the most vital linguistic unit of technical documentation. Characterising the content of documents by the terminology they contain is a key factor in satisfactory document retrieval. But when users require answers rather than documents, more complex strategies for exploiting terminology are needed. Dealing effectively with this problem requires not only good techniques for terminology extraction but also ways to organize and structure the terminology. We describe some potential solutions to this problem, taking a Question Answering system as an example. We show which benefits our techniques bring to the system. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-19107 Originally published at: Rinaldi, F; Dowdall, J; Hess, M; Kaljurand, K; Karlsson, M (2003). The role of technical Terminology in Question Answering. In: Terminologie et Intelligence Artificielle, TIA-2003, Strasbourg, France, March 2003 March 2003, 156-165. Conférence TIA-2003, Strasbourg, 31 mars et 1 avril 2003 The Role of Technical Terminology in Question Answering Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Kaarel Kaljurand, Magnus Karlsson Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zürich Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland frinaldi,dowdall,hess,kalju,[email protected]