Offline strategies for online question answering

Recent work in Question Answering has focused on web-based systems that extract answers using simple lexico-syntactic patterns. We present an alternative strategy in which patterns are used to extract highly precise relational information offline, creating a data repository that is used to efficiently answer questions. We evaluate our strategy on a challenging subset of questions, i.e. "Who is ..." questions, against a state of the art web-based Question Answering system. Results indicate that the extracted relations answer 25% more questions correctly and do so three orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art system.