A study on the use of summaries and summary-based query expansion for a question-answering task

摘要

In this paper we report an initial study on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents. The summaries are composed of a set of sentences that highlight the main points of the document as they relate to the query. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion. We present the results of a set of experiments to test these two approaches and discuss the relative success of these techniques.