We approach cross-lingual question answering by using a mono-lingual QA system for the source language and by translating resulting answers into the target language. As far as we are aware, this is the first cross-lingual QA system in the history of CLEF that uses this method - almost without exception, cross-lingual QA systems use translation of the question or query terms instead. We demonstrate the feasibility of our alternative approach by using a mono-lingual QA system for English, and translating answers and finding appropriate documents in Italian and Dutch. For factoid and definition questions, we achieve overall accuracy scores ranging from 13% (EN→NL) to 17% (EN→IT) and lenient accuracy figures from 19% (EN→NL) to 25% (EN→IT). The advantage of this strategy to cross-lingual QA is that translation of answers is easier than translating questions - the disadvantage is that answers might be missing from the source corpus and additional effort is required for finding supporting documents of the target language. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.
CITATION STYLE
Bos, J., & Nissim, M. (2007). Answer translation: An alternative approach to cross-lingual question answering. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 4730 LNCS, pp. 290–299). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74999-8_36
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