Question-answering system based on concepts and statistics

Abstract

Question-answering systems provide short answers with the use of available information. The implementation mechanism for a question answering system is presented in this paper and is based on concepts and statistics. The system determines the question and focuses on the answer types, making different conceptual expansions for different questions. It applies the latent semantic indexing (LSI) method to retrieve relevant passages. It uses matching algorithms to find a match between questions and sentences stored in a database. It also extracts answers from a frequently asked questions (FAQ) database by finding matching or similar sentences. The answering ability of the system has been improved with the use of LSI and FAQ. The question-answering system introduced in Chinese universities is a developed and proven system capable of precise results.

Keywords

question-answering system, concept expansion, latent semantic analysis, similarity of sentence, passage match