QUASAR: The Question Answering System of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

This paper describes the QUASAR Question Answering Information System developed by the RFIA group at the Departamento de Sistemas Informaticos y Computacion of the Universidad Politecnica of Valencia for the 2005 edition of the CLEF Question Answering exercise. We participated in three monolingual tasks: Spanish, Italian and French, and in two cross-language tasks: Spanish to English and English to Spanish. Since this was our first participation, we focused our work on the passage-based search engine while using simple pattern matching rules for the Answer Extraction phase. As regards the cross-language tasks, we had to resort to the most common web translation tools.