Question Answering with QED and Wee at TREC 2004

This report describes the experiments of the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sydney at the TREC-2004 question answering evaluation exercise. Our system combines two approaches: one with deep linguistic analysis using IR on the AQUAINT corpus applied to answer extraction from text passages, and one with a shallow linguistic analysis and shallow inference applied to a large set of snippets retrieved from the web. The results of our experiments support the following claims: (1) Webbased IR is a good alternative to “traditional” IR; and (2) deep linguistic analysis improves quality of exact answers.