tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A Two-Stage Approach to Retrieving Answers for How-To Questions"

This paper addresses the problem of automatically retrieving answers for how-to questions, focusing on those that inquire about the procedure for achieving a specific goal. For such questions, typical information retrieval methods, based on key word matching, are better suited to detecting the content of the goal (., ‘installing a Windows XP server’) than the general nature of the desired information (., procedural, a series of steps for achieving this goal). We suggest dividing the process of retrieving answers for such questions into two stages, with each stage focusing on modeling one aspect of a how-to question. . | A Two-Stage Approach to Retrieving Answers for How-To Questions Ling Yin CMIS University of Brighton Brighton BN2 4GJ United Kingdom Abstract This paper addresses the problem of automatically retrieving answers for how-to questions focusing on those that inquire about the procedure for achieving a specific goal. For such questions typical information retrieval methods based on key word matching are better suited to detecting the content of the goal . installing a Windows XP server than the general nature of the desired information . procedural a series of steps for achieving this goal . We suggest dividing the process of retrieving answers for such questions into two stages with each stage focusing on modeling one aspect of a how-to question. We compare the two-stage approach with two alternative approaches a baseline approach that only uses the content of the goal to retrieve relevant documents and another approach that explores the potential of automatic query expansion. The result of the experiment shows that the two-stage approach significantly outperforms the baseline but achieves similar result with the systems using automatic query expansion techniques. We analyze the reason and also present some future work. 1 Introduction How-To questions constitute a large proportion of questions on the Web. Many how-to questions inquire about the procedure for achieving a specific goal. For such questions typical information retrieval IR methods based on key word matching are better suited to detecting the content of the goal . installing a Windows XP server than the general nature of the desired information . procedural a series of steps for achieving this goal . The reasons are given as below. First documents that describe a procedure often do not contain the word procedure itself but we are able to abstract the concept procedure from cues such as first next and then all of which indicate sequential relationships between actions. .