Retrieving NASA problem reports: a case study in natural language information retrieval
A system that retrieves problem reports from a NASA database is described.1 The database is queried with natural language questions. Part-of-speech tags are first assigned to each word in the question using a rule-based tagger. A partial parse of the question is then produced with independent sets of deterministic finite state automata. Using partial parse information, a look up strategy searches the database for problem reports relevant to the question. A bigram stemmer and irregular verb conjugates have been incorporated into the system to improve accuracy. The system is evaluated by a set of 55 questions posed by NASA engineers. A discussion of future research is also presented.
natural language information retrieval partial parsing finite state