Question Answering in Terminology-Rich Technical Domains

The current tendency in Question Answering is towards the processing of large volumes of opendomain text. This inclination is spurred by the creation of the Question Answering track in TREC, and the recent increase of systems that use the Web to extract the answers to the questions. This undoubtedly has the advantage that narrow, application-specific concerns can be overlooked in favour of more general approaches. However, the unconstrained nature of the domain and questions does not necessarily lead to systems that are better at specific tasks that may be required in a deployed application. By contrast, the non-redundant nature of most technical documentation and the use of domain specific sublanguage and terminology makes them unsuitable to (some of) the approaches seen in the TREC QA competition. We discuss the specific nature of technical documentation, with examples from real domains (e.g. the Maintenance Manual of a commercial aircraft) and illustrate solutions that have been adopted in a QA system.