Retrieving NASA problem reports: a case study in natural language information retrieval

✍ Scribed by Sebastian van Delden; Fernando Gomez

• Book ID: 104308895
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 354 KB
• Volume: 48
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-023X
• DOI: 10.1016/s0169-023x(03)00106-x

✦ Synopsis

A system that retrieves problem reports from a NASA database is described. 1 The database is queried with natural language questions. Part-of-speech tags are first assigned to each word in the question using a rule-based tagger. A partial parse of the question is then produced with independent sets of deterministic finite state automata. Using partial parse information, a look up strategy searches the database for problem reports relevant to the question. A bigram stemmer and irregular verb conjugates have been incorporated into the system to improve accuracy. The system is evaluated by a set of 55 questions posed by NASA engineers. A discussion of future research is also presented.