Monolingual Web-based Factoid Question Answering in Chinese, Swedish, English and Japanese

Abstract

In this paper we extend the application of our statistical pattern classification approach to question answering (QA) which has previously been applied successfully to English and Japanese to develop two prototype QA systems in Chinese and Swedish. We show what data is necessary to achieve this and also evaluate the performance of the two new systems using a translation of the TREC 2003 factoid QA task. While performance for Chinese and Swedish is found to be lower than that for the more developed English and Japanese systems we explain why this is the case and offer solutions for their improvement. All systems form the basis of our publicly accessible web-based multilingual QA system at http://asked.jp.