DCU@FIRE 2011: SMS-based FAQ Retrieval

This paper gives an overview of DCU’s participation in the SMS-based FAQ Retrieval task at FIRE 2011. DCU submitted three runs for monolingual English experiments. The approach consisted of first transforming the noisy SMS queries into a normalised, corrected form. The normalised queries were then used to retrieve a ranked list of FAQ results by combining the results from three slightly different retrieval mechanisms. Finally, using information from the retrieval results, out-ofdomain (OOD) queries were identified and tagged. The results of our best run on the final test set were 0.702 in-domain query answers correctly retrieved, 0.856 out-of-domain queries correctly identified, and an MMR score of 0.896.