Experiments on Robust NL Question Interpretation and Multi-layered Document Annotation for a Cross-Language Question/Answering-System

This report describes the work done by the QA group of the Language Technology Lab at DFKI, for the 2004 edition of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). Based on the experience we obtained through our participation at QA@Clef-2003 with our initial cross-lingual QA prototype system BiQue (cf. [NS03]), the focus of the system extension for this year’s task was a) on robust NL question interpretation using advanced linguistic-based components, b) flexible interface strategies to IR-search engines, and c) on strategies for off-line annotation of the data collection, which support query-specific indexing and answer selection. The overall architecture of the extended system, as well as the results obtained in the CLEF–2004 Monolingual German and Bilingual German/English QA tracks will be presented and discussed throughout the paper.