Insun05QA on QA Track of TREC 2005

This is the first time that our group takes part in the QA track. At TREC2005, the system we developed, Insun05QA, participated in the Main Task, which submitted answers to three types of questions: factoid questions, list questions and others questions. And we also submitted the document ranking which our answers are generated from. A new sentence similarity calculating method is used in our Insun05QA system. It can be considered as an extension of vector space model. And our QA system incorporates several useful tools. These tools include WordNet, developed by Princeton University, Minipar by Dekang Lin, and GATE, developed by University of Sheffield. Moreover, external knowledge such as knowledge from Internet is also widely used in our system. Since it is the first time that we take part in QA track and the preparing time is limited, we concentrate on the processing of factoid questions. And the methods we developed to process list and others questions are generated from the method used to process factoid questions. The structure of our Insun05QA system will be describe in Section 2, the details of how we process the factoid, list and others questions will be introduced in Section 3, and our results in TREC2005 will be presented in Section 4.