The University of Amsterdam's Question Answering System at QA@CLEF 2007

We describe a new version of our question answering system, which was applied to the questions of the 2007 CLEF Question Answering Dutch monolingual task. This year, we made three major modifications to the system: (1) we added the contents of Wikipedia to the document collection and the answer tables; (2) we completely rewrote the module interface code in Java; and (3) we included a new table stream which returned answer candidates based on information which was learned from question-answer pairs. Unfortunately, the changes did not lead to improved performance. Unsolved technical problems at the time of the deadline have led to missing justifications for a large number of answers in our submission. Our single run obtained an accuracy of only 8% with an additional 12% of unsupported answers (compared to 21% in the last year’s task).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Valentin Jijkoun, Katja Hofmann, David Ahn, Mahboob Alam Khalid, Joris van Rantwijk, Maarten de Rijke, Erik F. Tjong Kim Sang
• Keywords: CLEF 2007, Dutch Monolingual Task, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Question Answering System