{"id":{"repo_id":"mit","oai_identifier":"oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33141"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/mit/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33141","repository":{"repo_id":"mit","name":"MIT","base_url":"https://dspace.mit.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Answering definitional questions before they are asked","abstract":"Most question answering systems narrow down their search space by issuing a boolean IR query on a keyword indexed corpus. This technique often proves futile for definitional questions, because they only contain one keyword or name. Thus, an IR search for only that term is likely to produce many spurious results; documents that contain mentions of the keyword, but not in a definitional context. An alternative approach is to glean the corpus in pre-processing for syntactic constructs in which entities are defined. In this thesis, I describe a regular expression language for detecting such constructs, with the help of a part-of-speech tagger and a named-entity recognizer. My system, named CoL. ForBIN, extracts entities and their definitions, and stores them in a database. This reduces the task of definitional question answering to a simple database lookup.","abstract_html":"Most question answering systems narrow down their search space by issuing a boolean IR query on a keyword indexed corpus. This technique often proves futile for definitional questions, because they only contain one keyword or name. Thus, an IR search for only that term is likely to produce many spurious results; documents that contain mentions of the keyword, but not in a definitional context. An alternative approach is to glean the corpus in pre-processing for syntactic constructs in which entities are defined. In this thesis, I describe a regular expression language for detecting such constructs, with the help of a part-of-speech tagger and a named-entity recognizer. My system, named CoL. ForBIN, extracts entities and their definitions, and stores them in a database. This reduces the task of definitional question answering to a simple database lookup.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Fernandes, Aaron D. (Aaron David)"],"institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.","school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["Boris Katz."],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2004,"date_issued":"2004","date_published":"2004","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:21:08Z","subjects":["Electrical Engineering and Computer Science."],"languages":["eng"],"rights":["M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. 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