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<Paper uid="P02-1054">
  <Title>Is It the Right Answer? Exploiting Web Redundancy for Answer Validation</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusion and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have presented a novel approach to answer validation based on the intuition that the amount of implicit knowledge which connects an answer to a question can be quantitatively estimated by exploiting the redundancy of Web information. Results obtained on the TREC-2001 QA corpus correlate well with the human assessment of answers' correctness and confirm that a Web-based algorithm provides a workable solution for answer validation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Several activities are planned in the near future.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> First, the approach we presented is currently based on fixed validation patterns that combine single words extracted both from the question and from the answer. These word-level patterns provide a broad coverage (i.e. many documents are typically retrieved) in spite of a low precision (i.e also weak correlations among the keyword are captured). To increase the precision we want to experiment other types of patterns, which combine words into larger units (e.g. phrases or whole sentences). We believe that the answer validation process can be improved both considering pattern variations (from word-level to phrase and sentence-level), and the trade-off between the precision of the search pattern and the number of retrieved documents. Preliminary experiments confirm the validity of this hypothesis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Then, a generate and test module based on the validation algorithm presented in this paper will be integrated in the architecture of our QA system under development. In order to exploit the efficiency and the reliability of the algorithm, such system will be designed trying to maximize the recall of retrieved candidate answers. Instead of performing a deep linguistic analysis of these passages, the system will delegate to the evaluation component the selection of the right answer.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>