Designing Amharic Definitive Question Answering

This publication is about Amharic language question answer. The amount of available information is becoming very huge especially with the Web proliferation. The problem faced by the user is not the lack of documents or information but is the lack of time to find a short and precise answer among the variety of available documents. Search engines offer a lot of links toward web pages but are not able to provide an exact answer; instead return ranked documents based on relevance measure with the posed query from users. Thus a new need is emerged: the possibility of obtaining a brief and concise answer. Providing a brief and concise answer is the main goal of Question Answering systems. The proposed Question Answering approach in this study deals with Amharic definition question by applying surface text pattern method. This method considers two main steps. First it applies a pattern to discover a set of definition-related text patterns from the Amharic legal corpus. Then using these patterns it extracts a collection of concept-description pairs from a target document file and applies the definition extraction to return answer to a given question.