DFKI-lt at QA@CLEF 2008

Abstract

The paper describes QUANTICO, a cross-language open domain factoid question answering system for German and English document collections. The main features of the system are: use of preemptive off-line document annotation with information like Named Entities, abbreviation-extension pairs and appositional constructions; use of online translation services for the cross-language scenarios; use of redundancy as an indicator of good answer candidates; selection of the best answers based on distance metrics defined over graph representations. The results of evaluating the system's performance by QA@CLEF 2008 were as follows: for the German-German run we achieved a best overall accuracy (ACC) of 37%; for the English-German run 14.5% (ACC); and for the German-English run 14% (ACC). © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.