Semantic Unit Based Question Representation

Question representation is a fundamental task in Question Answering (QA) system. An approach based on semantic unit (SU) is proposed, which selects the domain words and phrases as semantic components, and organize them together to form SU instances according their relationships in domain ontology. The question is represented by the vector of SU instances. With the supports of shallow semantic analysis and domain ontology, SUs instances are easily constructed and extracted using some simple rules. In a QA system of computer fault diagnoses restricted domain, the proposed method has been employed and implemented. Experimental results have shown its efficiency and contributions to the improvement of overall performance of QA.