Finding similar questions in large question and answer archives

ABSTRACT

There has recently been a significant increase in the number of community-based question and answer services on the Web where people answer other peoples' questions. These services rapidly build up large archives of questions and answers, and these archives are a valuable linguistic resource. One of the major tasks in a question and answer service is to find questions in the archive that a semantically similar to a user's question. This enables high quality answers from the archive to be retrieved and removes the time lag associated with a community-based system. In this paper, we discuss methods for question retrieval that are based on using the similarity between answers in the archive to estimate probabilities for a translation-based retrieval model. We show that with this model it is possible to find semantically similar questions with relatively little word overlap.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.0 General

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
FAQ retrieval, information retrieval, language models