Question Answering with Joost at CLEF 2007

We describe our system for the monolingual Dutch and multilingual English to Dutch QA tasks. First, we present a brief overview of our QA-system, which makes heavy use of syntactic information. Next, we describe the modules that were developed especially for CLEF 2007, i.e. preprocessing of Wikipedia, inclusion of query expansion in IR, anaphora resolution in follow-up questions, and a question classification module for the multilingual task. We achieved 25.5% accuracy for the Dutch monolingual task, and 13.5% accuracy for the multilingual task. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Language translation; Linguistics General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Performance, Experimentation Keywords Question Answering, Dutch, Wikipedia, Information Retrieval, Query Expansion, Anaphora Resolution

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Gosse Bouma, Geert Kloosterman, Jori Mur, Gertjan van Noord, Lonneke van der Plas, Jörg Tiedemann
• Keywords: Anaphora Resolution, CLEF 2007, Information Retrieval, Multilingual Task, Query Expansion