Detecting Expected Answer Relations through Textual Entailment.

This paper presents a novel approach to Question Answering over structured data, which is based on Textual Entailment recognition. The main idea is that the QA problem can be recast as an entailment problem, where the text (T) is the question and the hypothesis (H) is a relational pattern, which is associated to “instructions” for retrieving the answer to the question. In this framework, given a question Q and a set of answer patterns P, the basic operation is to select those patterns in P that are entailed by Q. We report on a number of experiments which show the great potentialities of the proposed approach.