Definition Sentences Recognition Based on Definition Centroid

This paper is concerned with the problem of recognizing definition sentences. Given a definition question like "Who is the person X?", we are to retrieve the definition sentences which capture descriptive information correspond variously to a person's age, occupation, of some role a person played in an event from the collection of news articles. In order to retrieve as many relevant sentences for the definition question as possible, we adopt a centroid based statistical approach which has been applied in summarization of multiple documents. To improve the precision and recall performance, the weight measure of centroid words is supplemented by using external knowledge resource such as Wikipedia and redundant candidate sentences are removed from candidate definitions. We see some improvements obtained by our approach over the baseline for 20 IT persons who have high document frequency.