Rhetoric Map of an Answer to Compound Queries

Given a discourse tree for a text as a candidate answer to a compound query, we propose a rule system for valid and invalid occurrence of the query keywords in this tree. To be a valid answer to a query, its keywords need to occur in a chain of elementary discourse unit of this answer so that these units are fully ordered and connected by nucleus – satellite relations. An answer might be invalid if the queries’ keywords occur in the answer's satellite discourse units only. We build the rhetoric map of an answer to prevent it from firing by queries whose keywords occur in non-adjacent areas of the Answer Map. We evaluate the improvement of search relevance by filtering out search results not satisfying the proposed rule system, demonstrating a 4% increase of accuracy with respect to the nearest neighbor learning approach which does not use the discourse tree structure.