... What is the Amazon River at its origin? ... Location

1
ILQUA An IE-Driven Question Answering
System Min Wu Tomek Strzalkowski
Key Technologies Surface Text Pattern Matching
Patterns automatically generated by a pattern
learning system and represented as regular
expressions N-Gram Proximity Search N-grams
of question terms matched around every named
entity and proximity score calculated
Syntactic Dependency Matching Syntactic
relation triples of question matched with parsed
sentences containing answer candidates Syntactic
Patterns with Semantic Features Matched
against parsed candidate sentences to extract
answers to Other questions
Topic 187 Amazon River 187.6 What is the name
of the Amazon River at its origin? Simplified
What is the Amazon River at its origin?
ltLocationgt(ltgt?)lt\/Locationgt.1,15NP1.1,15NP
2 0.8005 Answer Extracted Peru And
es ltLocationgt(ltgt?)lt\/Locationgt.1,30NP1.1,15
NP2 0.7712 Answer Generated Mount
Mismi NP2.1,30NP1.1,15ltLocationgt(ltgt?)lt\/Lo
cationgt 0.7362 Answer
Generated Carhuasanta River
ANSWER Carhuasanta River
187.7 Others

Answer Extracted 1. Peru
0.87556 occurrence18 2.
Andes 0.86053
occurrence 6 3. Mount Mismi 0.85246
occurrence 2 4. Cailloma mountains
0.85246 occurrence 2 5. Carhuasanta River
0.81824 occurrence 1
Top 7 Documents
Question Dependency Triples fin CwhnN
what fin CiVBE be be VBEpredN
Amazon River Amazon River NsubjN
what Amazon River NdetDet the Amazon
River Nlex-modU Amazon Amazon River
NmodPrep at at Preppcomp-nN
origin origin NgenN its
NP_t NP_b NP NP_t_b NP PP_t_d NP_d PP_te NP_t
SBAR_d_b NP_te VP_d VBN PP_d PP_t VBD PP PP_t
PP_d NP_te NP NP NP_te NP SBAR_te AUX ADVP_d
VP_t_d NP PP_te NP JJS NN NN_t NP JJS NN NNS_t
NP_t VP_d NP_t_d VP IN NP_t_d

• after three weeks of rains caused the Amazon
• River and its Itaya and Nanay tributaries to
  flood
• 2. establish the origin of the Amazon River , the
  
• longest in the world
• 3. the Amazon River changed its course , during
• which two other islands (Zancudo I and Zancudo
• II) Disappeared
• 4. Cocaine production and refinement in Peru ,
• Colombia and Bolivia are polluting tributaries of
  
• the Amazon River
• 5. The Parque dos Igarapes , about four miles
• from downtown , has 15 bungalows set on 40
• acres of Amazon forest .
• 6. an area of 7,050 square kilometers , based on
• their measurements made at Cailloma mountains
• 7. The Amazon River was born in the Andes in
• Peru and runs 6,500 kilometers long , with 3,165
• km in Brazil .
• 8. argue the start , of the Amazon River , which

Answer Candidate Carhuasanta River origin
NmodPrep of of Preppcomp-nN
river river NgenN world world NdetDet
the world NpossU 's river NmodA
long river NpuncU , river NappoN
Amazon Amazon NdetDet the find
VpuncU , find VmodC inf inf
CsN inf CiVBE be be VBEauxAux
to be VBEpredN Carhuasanta River
Answer Candidate Mount Mismi travel through
VobjN Mount Mismi Mount Mismi Nlex-modU
Mount Mount Mismi NmodPrep in in
Preppcomp-nN Peru Peru NmodA
southern Peru NrelC inf inf CsN
inf CiV establish establish
VauxAux to establish VsubjN
Peru establish VobjN origin origin
NdetDet the origin NmodPrep of of
Preppcomp-nN Amazon River
Answer Candidate Peru to Preppcomp-nN
Peru Peru NrelC inf inf CsN inf
CiV try try VauxAux to try
VsubjN Peru try VpuncU
and try VconjV find find VsubjN
Peru find VobjN origin origin
NdetDet the origin NmodPrep of of
Preppcomp-nN Amazon River Amazon River
NdetDet the Amazon River Nlex-modU
Amazon
Answer Candidate Andes Peruvian Andes
NmodPrep for for Preppcomp-nN
origin origin NdetDet the origin
NmodPrep of of Preppcomp-nN Amazon
River Amazon River NdetDet the Amazon
River Nlex-modU Amazon
Pattern Learning
Topic / Answers
Acknowledgement University of Massachusetts at
Amherst ( Inquery ) BBN Technologies
(Identifinder) Stanford University (Stanford
Parser)
Reference Wu, M., M. Duan, S. Small and T.
Strzalkowski,ILQ UA An IE-Driven Question
Answering System. In Proceedings of TREC-14.
2006. Wu, M. and T. Strzalkowski, Utilizing
Co-occurrence of Answers in Question Answering.
In Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006. July 2006.