CL Research participated in the question answering and novelty tracks in TREC 2004. The Knowledge Management System (KMS), which provides a single interface for question answering, text summarization, information extraction, and document exploration, was used for these tasks. Question answering is performed directly within KMS, which answers questions either from a repository or the Internet. The novelty task was performed with the XML Analyzer, which includes many of the functions used in the KMS summarization routines. These tasks are based on creating and exploiting an XML representation of the texts used for these two tracks. For the QA track, we submitted one run and our overall score was 0.156, with scores of 0.161 for factoid questions, 0.064 for list questions, and 0.239 for "other" questions; these scores are significantly improved from TREC 2003. For the novelty track, we submitted two runs for task 1, one run for task 2, four runs for task 3, and one run for task ...
Kenneth C. Litkowski