The role of technical Terminology in Question Answering

Terminology is arguably the most vital linguistic unit of technical documentation. Characterising the content of documents by the terminology they contain is a key factor in satisfactory document retrieval. But when users require answers rather than documents, more complex strategies for exploiting terminology are needed. Dealing effectively with this problem requires not only good techniques for terminology extraction but also ways to organize and structure the terminology. We describe some potential solutions to this problem, taking a Question Answering system as an example. We show which benefits our techniques bring to the system