Question answering on English and Romanian languages

Abstract

2009 marked UAIC's fourth consecutive participation at the QA@CLEF competition, with continually improving results. This paper describes UAIC's QA systems participating in the Ro-Ro and En-En tasks. Both systems adhered to the classical QA architecture, with an emphasis on simplicity and real time answers: only shallow parsing was used for question processing, the indexes used by the retrieval module were at coarse-grained paragraph and document levels, and the answer extraction component used simple pattern-based rules and lexical similarity metrics for candidate answer ranking. The results obtained for this year's participation were greatly improved from those of our team's previous participations, with an accuracy of 54% on the EN-EN task and 47% on the RO-RO task. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.