NTT's Japanese-English Cross-Language Question Answering System

This paper describes NTT’s Japanese-English Cross-Language Question Answering System SAIQAJ/E. The system performed best among eight systems that participated in the Japanese-English subtask of the NTCIR Cross-Language Question Answering task. For cross-language document retrieval, we used a dictionary-based approach without word sense disambiguation. We used a synonym operator to represent translation alternatives. Our experiments show that the synonym operator improved the retrieval precision of our proximity-based document retrieval module. We also developed a web-based back-transliteration submodule for unknown katakana words.