... from questions identi-fied in a log of Web queries submitted to theEncarta encyclopedia service. These questionsinclude traditional WH- questions, which beginwith “what”, “when”, “where”, “which”, ... head verb ina question, e.g., “know”, “be” or action verb;and (2) the initial component of a question, whichusually encompasses the first word or two of the question, e.g., “what”, “when” or “how ... construction of statistical mod-els of WH- questions. These models,which are built from shallow linguis-tic features of questions, are employedto predict target variables which repre-sent a user’s informational...