Elhuyar-IXA: Semantic Relatedness and Cross-lingual Passage Retrieval

This article describes the participation of the joint Elhuyar-IXA group in the ResPubliQA exercise at QA&CLEF. In particular, we participated in the English–English monolingual task and in the Basque–English crosslingual one. Our focus has been threefold: (1) to check to what extent information retrieval (IR) can achieve good results in passage retrieval without question analysis and answer validation, (2) to check Machine Readable Dictionary (MRD) techniques for the Basque to English retrieval when faced with the lack of parallel corpora for Basque in this domain, and (3) to check the contribution of semantic relatedness based on WordNet to expand the passages to related words. Our results show that IR provides good results in the monolingual task, that our crosslingual system performs lower than the monolingual runs, and that semantic relatedness improves the results in both tasks (by 6 and 2 points, respectively).