A Noisy-Channel Approach to Question Answering

We introduce a probabilistic noisychannel model for question answering and we show how it can be exploited in the context of an end-to-end QA system. Our noisy-channel system outperforms a stateof-the-art rule-based QA system that uses similar resources. We also show that the model we propose is flexible enough to accommodate within one mathematical framework many QA-specific resources and techniques, which range from the exploitation of WordNet, structured, and semi-structured databases to reasoning, and paraphrasing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Abdessamad Echihabi, Daniel Marcu
• Keywords: ACL 2003, ACL 2007, End-to-end Qa System, Probabilistic Noisychannel Model, Stateof-the-art Rule-based Qa