A hybrid question answering schema using encapsulated semantics in lexical resources

Question Answering systems, as an extreme of the Information Retrieval field, could save lots of time and effort in satisfying a specific information need. In this regard, there are still many challenges to be resolved by current state-of-the-art systems as they cope with free texts. We propose a new hybrid question answering schema capable of answering questions with respect to different semantically related syntactically mismatched situations either in a structured or unstructured semantic format. We have exploited FrameNet and WordNet lexical resources and implemented the prototype system in a TREC-friendly fashion to obtain results comparable with outstanding participant systems in TREC 2004.