Question answering experiments for Finnish and French

Abstract

This paper presents a question answering (QA) system called Tikka. Tikka's approach to QA is based on question classification, semantic annotation and answer extraction pattern matching. Tikka's performance is evaluated by conducting experiments in the following tasks: monolingual Finnish and French and bilingual Finnish-English QA. Tikka is the first system ever reported to perform monolingual textual QA in the Finnish language. This is also the task in which its performance is best: 23% of all questions are answered correctly. Tikka's performance in the monolingual French task is a little inferior to its performance in the monolingual Finnish task, and when compared to the other systems evaluated with the same data in the same task, its performance is near the average. In the bilingual Finnish-English task, Tikka was the only participating system, and - as is expected - its performance was inferior to those attained in the monolingual tasks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.