Cluster-Based Query Expansion for Statistical Question Answering

Document retrieval is a critical component of question answering (QA), yet little work has been done towards statistical modeling of queries and towards automatic generation of high quality query content for QA. This paper introduces a new, cluster-based query expansion method that learns queries known to be successful when applied to similar questions. We show that cluster-based expansion improves the retrieval performance of a statistical question answering system when used in addition to existing query expansion methods. This paper presents experiments with several feature selection methods used individually and in combination. We show that documents retrieved using the cluster-based approach are inherently different than documents retrieved using existing methods and provide a higher data diversity to answers extractors.