Adaptive context-based term (re) weighting: an experiment on single-word question answering

Term weighting is a crucial task in many Information Retrieval applications. Common approaches are based either on statistical or on natural language analysis. In this paper, we present a new algorithm that capitalizes from the advantages of both the strategies. In the proposed method, the weights are computed by a parametric function, called Context Function, that models the semantic influence exercised amongst the terms. The Context Function is learned by examples, so that its implementation is mostly automatic. The algorithm was successfully tested on a data set of crossword clues, which represent a case of Single-Word Question Answering.