A study on the use of summaries and summary-based query expansion for a question-answering task

Ruthven, I. and Tombros, A. and Jose, J.M.; Thiel, U. and Fuhr, N., eds. (2001) A study on the use of summaries and summary-based query expansion for a question-answering task. In: 23rd BCS European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR 2001), 2001-04-04 - 2001-04-06.

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Abstract

In this paper we report an initial study on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents. The summaries are composed of a set of sentences that highlight the main points of the document as they relate to the query. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion. We present the results of a set of experiments to test these two approaches and discuss the relative success of these techniques.