Answering Definition Questions Using Web Knowledge Bases

This paper presents a definition question answering approach, which is capable of mining textual definitions from large collections of documents. In order to automatically identify definition sentences from a large collection of documents, we utilize the existing definitions in the Web knowledge bases instead of hand-crafted rules or annotated corpus. Effective methods are adopted to make full use of Web knowledge bases, and they promise high quality response to definition questions. We applied our system in the TREC 2004 definition question-answering task and achieved an encouraging performance with the Fmeasure score of 0.404, which was ranked second among all the submitted runs.