A question answering system based on VerbNet frames

The precision of the answer is now essential for a question answering system, because of the large amount of free texts on the Internet. Attempting to achieve a high precision, we propose a question answering system supported by case grammar theory and based on VerbNet frames. It extracts the syntactic, thematic and semantic information from the question to filter out unmatched sentences in semantic level and to extract answer chunk (a phrase or a word that can answer the question) from the answer sentence. VerbNet is applied in our system to detect the verb frames in question and candidate sentences, so that the syntactic and thematic information as well as semantic information can be therefore obtained. Our question answering system works well especially for answering factoid questions. The experiments show that our approach is able to filter out semantically unmatched sentences effectively and therefore rank the correct answer (s) higher in the result list.