Reconstructing DIOGENE: ITC-irst at TREC 2006

Our participation in the TREC 2006 QA task is the first step on the way of developing a new and improved DIOGENE system. The leading principles of this re-engineering activity are: i) to create a modular architecture, based on a pipeline of modules which share common I/O formats, open to the insertion/substitution of new components; ii) to allow for the capability of configuring the settings of the different modules with external configuration files; iii) to provide the capability of performing fine-grained evaluation cycles over the individual processing modules which compose a QA system. Another long-term objective of our work on QA, is to make the core components of the system freely available to the QA community for research purposes. This paper overviews the work done up to date to achieve these objectives, focusing on the description of a prototype module designed to handle the anaphoric questions often contained into TREC QA series. Preliminar evaluation results of the new module are presented, together with those achieved by DIOGENE at TREC 2006.