TY - JOUR AU - Burke, Robin D. AU - Hammond, Kristian J. AU - Kulyukin, Vladimir AU - Lytinen, Steven L. AU - Tomuro, Noriko AU - Schoenberg, Scott PY - 1997/06/15 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Question Answering from Frequently Asked Question Files: Experiences with the FAQ FINDER System JF - AI Magazine JA - AIMag VL - 18 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.1609/aimag.v18i2.1294 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/1294 SP - 57 AB - This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system's performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach. ER -