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<Paper uid="W06-1113">
  <Title>Variants of tree similarity in a Question Answering task</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper studies the deployment in a question answering task of methods which assess the similarity of question and answer representations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Given questions such as Q1 what does malloc return ? Q2 What year did poet Emily Dickinson die? and a collection of sentences (eg. a computer manual, a corpus of newspaper articles), the task is to retrieve the sentences that answer the question, eg. A1 the malloc function returns a null pointer A2 In 1886 , poet Emily Dickinson died in Amherst , Mass One philosophy for finding answers to questions would be to convert questions and candidate answers into logical forms and to compute answerhood by apply theorem-proving methods. Another philosophy is to assume that the answers are similar to the questions, where similarity might be defined in many different ways. While not all answers to all questions will be similar, there's an intuition that most questions can be answered in a way which shares quite a bit with the question, and that accordingly with a large enough corpus, a similarity-based approach could be fruitful.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>