Answering Definitional Questions: A Hybrid Approach

We present DefScriber, a fully implemented system that combines knowledge-based and statistical methods in forming multi-sentence answers to open-ended definitional questions of the form, "What is X?" We show how a set of definitional predicates 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 definitions generated by DefScriber from Internet documents.