Using Abstraction Level in Question Answering System

Traditional question answering systems extract answers in terms of the relevance between answer and question. However, when there are multiple relevant answers to a question, people usually use other dimensions besides relevance to select answers. Abstraction level is a frequently used dimension to distinguish general answer and specific answer. Previous question answering systems seldom consider the dimension. This paper proposes a way to calculate the abstraction level of answer. Experiments show that abstraction level can improve question answering in certain situations.