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.
Jeon et al REF presented a method for a translation-based model to retrieve an answer to a question based on similarities of answers to find similar questions in the question and answer archives.
Finding similar questions in large question and answer archives
CIKM '05
Computer Science