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Why-Type Question to Query Reformulation for Efficient Document Retrieval

OAI: oai:igi-global.com:289948 DOI: 10.4018/IJIRR.289948
Published by: IGI Global

Abstract

Understanding the actual need of user from a question is very crucial in non-factoid why-question answering as Why-questions are complex and involve ambiguity and redundancy in their understanding. The precise requirement is to determine the focus of question and reformulate them accordingly to retrieve expected answers to a question. The paper analyzes different types of why-questions and proposes an algorithm for each class to determine the focus and reformulate it into a query by appending focal terms and cue phrase ‘because’ with it. Further, a user interface is implemented which asks input why-question, applies different components of question , reformulates it and finally retrieve web pages by posing query to Google search engine. To measure the accuracy of the process, user feedback is taken which asks them to assign scoring from 1 to 10, on how relevant are the retrieved web pages according to their understanding. The results depict that maximum precision of 89% is achieved in Informational type why-questions and minimum of 48% in opinionated type why-questions.