Answering Definitional Questions: A Hybrid Approach

We present DefScriber, a fully imple- mented system that combines knowledge- based and statistical methods in forming multi-sentence answers to open-ended defi- nitional questions of the form, "What is X?" We show how a set of definitional predi- cates proposed as the knowledge-based side of our approach can be used to guide the selection of definitional sentences. Finally, we present results of an evaluation of defini- tions generated by DefScriber from Internet documents.