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<Paper uid="E06-3005">
  <Title>Developing an approach for why-question answering</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Until now, research in the field of automatic question answering (QA) has focused on factoid (closed-class) questions like who, what, where and when questions. Results reported for the QA track of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) show that these types of wh-questions can be handled rather successfully (Voorhees 2003).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In the current project, we aim at developing an approach for automatically answering whyquestions. So far, why-questions have largely been ignored by researchers in the QA field. One reason for this is that the frequency of why-questions in a QA context is lower than that of other questions like who- and what-questions (Hovy et al., 2002a). However, although why-questions are less frequent than some types of factoids (who, what and where), their frequency is not negligible: in a QA context, they comprise about 5 percent of all wh-questions (Hovy, 2001; Jijkoun, 2005) and they do have relevance in QA applications (Maybury, 2002). A second reason for ignoring why-questions until now, is that it has been suggested that the techniques that have proven to be successful in QA for closed-class questions are not suitable for questions that expect a procedural answer rather than a noun phrase (Kupiec, 1999). The current paper aims to find out whether the suggestion is true that factoid-QA techniques are not suitable for why-QA. We want to investigate whether principled syntactic parsing can make QA for why-questions feasible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In the present paper, we report on the work that has been carried out until now. More specifically, sections 2 and 3 describe the approach taken to data collection and question analysis and the results that were obtained. Then, in section 4, we discuss the plans and goals for the work that will be carried out in the remainder of the project.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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