MITRE's Qanda at TREC-12

Qanda uses a general architecture for human language technology called Catalyst, (Burger & Mardis 2002, Nyberg et al., to appear). Developed at MITRE for the DARPA TIDES program, the Catalyst architecture is specifically designed for fast processing and for combining the strengths of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing into a single framework. Catalyst uses a dataflow architecture in which standoff annotations are passed from one component to another, with the components connected in arbitrary (acyclic) topologies. The use of standoff annotation permits components to be optimized for just those pieces of information they require for their processing.