Question Answering by Searching Large Corpora With Linguistic Methods

In this paper we describe the QuALiM Question Answering system which uses linguistic analysis of questions as well as candidate sentences in its answer finding process. To this end we have developed a rephrasing algorithm based on linguistic patterns that describe the structure of questions and candidate sentences and where precisely to find the answer in the candidate sentences. With this method and a fall-back strategy, both using the web as their primary data source, we participated in TREC 2004. We present our official results and a follow-up evaluation to elucidate the contribution of the methods used.

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