A semantic approach to boost passage retrieval effectiveness for question answering

In the current state of the rapid growth of information resources and the huge number of requests submitted by users to existing information retrieval systems; recently, Question Answering systems have attracted more attention to meet information needs providing users with more precise and focused retrieval units. As one of the most challenging and important processes of such systems is to retrieve the best related text excerpts with regard to the questions, we propose a novel approach to exploit not only the syntax of the natural language of the questions and texts, but also the semantics relayed beneath them via a semantic question rewriting and passage retrieval task. The semantic structure used to address the surface mismatch of the semantically related passages and queries is FrameNet which is a lexical resource for English constituted based on frame semantics. We have run our proposed approach on a subset of the TREC 2004 factoid questions to retrieve passages containing correct answers from the AQUAINT collection and we have obtained promising results.