Oxford English Dictionary 1989

1
Oxford English Dictionary (1989)

• factoid, n. and a.
• A. n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact,
  although it is not (or may not be) true spec. an
  assumption or speculation reported and repeated
  so often that it is popularly considered true a
  simulated or imagined fact.
• B. adj. Of or having the character of a factoid,
  quasi-factual spec. designating writing (esp.
  journalism) which contains a mixture of fact and
  supposition or invention presented as accepted
  fact.

2
Webclopedia

• Paper Toward Semantics-Based Answer Pinpointing
  Hovy et. al. 2001
• Information Sciences Institute, University of
  Southern California, Los Angeles
• Window-based pinpointing of answer candidates has
  limitations
• Two methods for improvement
• Syntactic-semantic question analysis
• QA pattern matching

3
WebclopediaQA Typology

• Attempt to represent the users intentions
• Hierarchy of QA types
• 17,384 questions from answers.com
• Distilled into 72 types

4
WebclopediaQA Typology

• Each node annotated with question and answer
  templates
• Manually created (?)
• Manually selected for nodes
• Future Learning QA patterns automatically
• Question examples and question template
• Who was President of Turkmenistan in 1994?
• Who is the composer of Eugene Onegin?
• Who is the chairman of GE?
• who be ltrolegt of ltentitygt
• Answer templates and actual answers
• ltentitygts ltrolegt ltpersongt
• ...Turkmenistans President Saparmurad Niyazov
• ltsubjectgtltpsv objectgt of related role-verb
• ...Chairman John Welch said ...GE's

5
WebclopediaParsing

• CONTEX
• Deterministic machine-learning based grammar
  learner/parser
• Originally built for MT
• Difficulties in adoption to question sentences
• Trained on 2048 Penn Treebank sentences
• Additional question sentences
• Creates a semantically annotated syntax parse
  tree (?)
• Used for parsing questions and answers
• QTargets had to be expanded for answers
• Arguments can be extracted

6
Webclopedia

• Matching
• Match QA patterns in the parse tree,
• Match Qtargets and Qwords in the parse tree,
• Match over the answer text using a word window
• Overall results
• QA patterns too specific
• Too sensitive to variations in phrasing
• CONTEX is able to some degree to identify
• The semantic type of the desired answer
• The corresponding types in candidate answers