Lexical validation of answers in Question Answering

Question answering (QA) aims at retrieving precise information from a large collection of documents, typically the Web. Different techniques can be used to find relevant information, and to compare these techniques, it is important to evaluate question answering systems. The objective of an Answer Validation task is to estimate the correctness of an answer returned by a QA system for a question, according to the text snippet given to support it. In this article, we present a lexical strategy for deciding if the snippets justify the answers, based on our own question answering system. We discuss our results, and show the possible extensions of our strategy.