Automatic derivation of surface text patterns for a maximum entropy based question answering system

In this paper we investigate the use of surface text patterns for a Maximum Entropy based Question Answering (QA) system. These text patterns are collected automatically in an unsupervised fashion using a collection of trivia question and answer pairs as seeds. These patterns are used to generate features for a statistical question answering system. We report our results on the TREC-10 question set.