Question Answering using Semantic Annotation

This paper presents a question answering (QA) system called Tikka. Tikka’s approach to QA relies heavily on the semantic annotation of text documents and on the usage of answer extraction patterns. In this way, Tikka applies to QA pattern-based techniques traditionally used in named entity recognition and information extraction. In the experiments presented in this paper, Tikka’s performance is evaluated in the following tasks: monolingual Finnish and French and bilingual Finnish-English QA. Its performance in the monolingual tasks is near the average when it is compared with the QA systems ’ performance that participated in the monolingual French task. In the monolingual Finnish task, Tikka was the only participating system.