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DECSAI
TECHNICAL REPORT
A Publication of the
Department of Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence
A High-performance FAQ Retrieval Method Using
Minimal Differentiator Expressions
Alejandro Moreo, Marı́a Navarro, Juan Luis Castro and Jose Manuel Zurita
Technical Report #DECSAI-11-10-05
October, 2011
This work has been supported by Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Junta de
Andalucı́a under proyects TIN2007-60199, TIC2009-5011, and TIN2007-67984.
E.T.S. de Ingenierı́a Informática. Universidad de Granada.
18071 Granada - Spain - Phone +34.58.244019, Fax +34.58.243317
A High-performance FAQ Retrieval Method Using Minimal
Differentiator Expressions
A. Moreo, M. Navarro, J.L Castro, J.M Zurita
Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, ETSI Informática, University of Granada,
Spain
Abstract
Case-based Reasoning (CBR) has proven to be a very useful technique to solve problems in ClosedDomains Question Answering such as FAQ retrieval. Instead of trying to uderstand the question
this method consists of retrieving the most similar case (Question/Answer pairs) among all cases
by analogy. Keyword comparison criterion or statistical approaches are often used to implement
similarity measure. However, those methods present the following disadvantages. On the one
side, choosing keywords is an expert-knowledge domain-dependant task that is often performed
manually. Furthermore, keyword comparison criterion does not guarantee the total differentiation
among cases. On the other side, statistical approaches do not perform with enough information in
sentence-level problems and are not interpretable. In order to alleviate these deficiencies we present
a new method called the Minimal Differentiator Expressions (MDE) algorithm. This algorithm
automatically obtains a set of linguistic patterns (expressions) used to retrieve the most relevant
case to the user question.Those patterns present the following advantages: they are composed by the
simplest sets of words which permit differentiation among cases and they are easily interpretable.
Keywords: Question Answering, FAQ retrieval, Question Recognition, CBR, Natural
Language.
1. Author’s note: link modified
This article was a preliminary study on Minimal Differentiator Expressions algorithm. This
study has been increased, submitted and accepted in Knowledge-Based Systems international journal. It will be available soon.
Email addresses: [email protected] (A. Moreo), [email protected] (M. Navarro),
[email protected] (J.L Castro), [email protected] (J.M Zurita)
Technical Report, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence