A Named entity recogniser for question answering

Named Entity Recognisers (NERs) are typically used by question answering (QA) systems as means to preselect answer candidates. However, there has not been much work on the formal assessment of the use of NERs for QA nor on their optimal parameters. In this paper we investigate the main characteristics of a NER for QA. The results show that it is important to maintain high recall to retain all possible answers on the one hand, while high precision is essential during the final answer selection phase. We present an NER designed for QA, which aims at having a high recall.8 page(s