Semantic computation in a Chinese Question-Answering system

This paper introduces a kind of semantic computation and presents how to combine it into our Chinese Question-Answering (QA) system. Based on two kinds of language resources,Hownet andCilin, we present an approach to computing the similarity and relevancy between words. Using these results, we can calculate the relevancy between two sentences and then get the optimal answer for the query in the system. The calculation adopts quantitative methods and can be incorporated into QA systems easily, avoiding some difficulties in conventional NLP (Natural Language Processing) problems. The experiments show that the results are satisfactory.