Is it the right answer?: exploiting web redundancy for Answer Validation

Answer Validation is an emerging topic in Question Answering, where open domain systems are often required to rank huge amounts of candidate answers. We present a novel approach to answer validation based on the intuition that the amount of implicit knowledge which connects an answer to a question can be quantitatively estimated by exploiting the redundancy of Web information. Experiments carried out on the TREC-2001 judged-answer collection show that the approach achieves a high level of performance (i.e. 81\% success rate). The simplicity and the efficiency of this approach make it suitable to be used as a module in Question Answering systems.