Cross-Language Question Answering at the University of Helsinki

Tikka is a cross-language question answering system developed at the University of Helsinki for the purposes of the QA@CLEF 2004 evaluation campaign, Tikka was conflgured to answer Finnish questions using a text corpus in English, but it is designed so that it can be conflgured to work with any other languages as well. Tikka is the flrst general domain question answering system ever reported to have used Finnish. The question type classifler, the translator, the answer extractor and the answer scorer are the components of Tikka that are especially developed for question answering.