Question-oriented answer summarization via term hierarchical structure

In the research area of community-based question and answering (cQA) services such as Yahoo! Answers, reuse of the answers has attracted more and more interest. Most researchers focus on the correctness of answers and pay little attention to the completeness of answers. In this paper, we try to address the answer completeness problem for "survey questions" for which answer completeness is crucial. We propose to generate a more complete answer from replies in cQA services through a term hierarchical structure based question-oriented extractive summarization which is different from traditional query-based extractive summarization. The experimental results are very promising in terms of recall, precision and conciseness.