We develop a simple log-linear model, in the spirit of traditional web-based QA systems (Kwok et al., 2001;Brill et al., 2002), that answers questions by querying the web and extracting the answer from returned web snippets.
our evaluation scheme is suitable for semantic parsing benchmarks in which the knowledge required for answering questions is covered by the web (in contrast with virtual assitants for which the knowledge is specific to an application).