Approaching Question Answering by means of Paragraph Validation

In this paper we describe the QA system developed for taking part in Res-PubliQA 2009. Our system was composed by an IR phase focused on improving QA results, a validation step for removing paragraphs that are not promising and a module based on ngrams overlapping for selecting the final answer. Furthermore, a selection module that uses lexical entailment in combination with ngrams overlapping was developed in English. The IR module achieved very promising results that were improved by the ngram ranking. Moreover, the ranking was slightly improved when lexical entailment was used.

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