Alignment-based surface patterns for factoid question answering systems

We propose an alignment-based surface pattern approach, called ABSP, which integrates semantic information into syntactic patterns for question answering (QA). ABSP employs a new strategy to extract surface patterns from non-segmented passages. It uses the surface patterns to extract important terms from questions, and then constructs the terms' relations from sentences in the corpus. Finally, the relations are used to rank answer candidates. Our experiments show that ABSP is highly accurate, and it can be incorporated into other QA systems that have high coverage. It can also be used in cross-lingual QA systems. The approach is robust and portable to other domains.