Oxford English Dictionary (1989) factoid, n. and a. A. n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact. B. adj. Of or having the character of a factoid, quasi- factual; spec. designating writing (esp. journalism) which contains a mixture of fact and supposition or invention presented as accepted fact.

Webclopedia Paper “Toward Semantics-Based Answer Pinpointing” – Hovy et. al Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Window-based pinpointing of answer candidates has limitations Two methods for improvement –Syntactic-semantic question analysis –QA pattern matching

Webclopedia QA Typology Attempt to represent the users intentions Hierarchy of QA types –17,384 questions from answers.com –Distilled into 72 types

Webclopedia QA Typology Each node annotated with question and answer templates –Manually created (?) –Manually selected for nodes –Future: Learning QA patterns automatically Question examples and question template Who was President of Turkmenistan in 1994? Who is the composer of Eugene Onegin? Who is the chairman of GE? who be of Answer templates and actual answers ’s...Turkmenistan’s President Saparmurad Niyazov | of related role-verb...Chairman John Welch said...GE's

Webclopedia Parsing CONTEX –Deterministic machine-learning based grammar learner/parser –Originally built for MT –Difficulties in adoption to question sentences Trained on 2048 Penn Treebank sentences Additional question sentences Creates a semantically annotated syntax parse tree (?) Used for parsing questions and answers –QTargets had to be expanded for answers –Arguments can be extracted

Webclopedia Matching –Match QA patterns in the parse tree, –Match Qtargets and Qwords in the parse tree, –Match over the answer text using a word window Overall results –QA patterns too specific Too sensitive to variations in phrasing –CONTEX is able to some degree to identify The semantic type of the desired answer The corresponding types in candidate answers