Information Retrieval Baselines for the ResPubliQA Task

This paper describes the baselines proposed for the ResPubliQA task. These baselines are purely based on information retrieval techniques. The selection of an adequate retrieval model that fit the specific characteristic of the supplied data is considered as a core part of the task. Applying a not adequate retrieval function would return a subset of paragraphs where the answer could not appear, and thus the posterior techniques applied in order to detect the answer within the subset of candidates paragraphs will fail. In order to check the ability to retrieve the right paragraph by a pure information retrieval approach, two baselines are proposed. Both of them use the Okapi-BM25[2] ranking function, with and without a stemming pre-process respectively. The main aim was to prove how well can a pure information retrieval system perform on this task.