Developing a Question Answering System for the Romanian-English Track at CLEF 2006

This paper describes the development of a question answering system for the RomanianEnglish cross-lingual track organized within the Cross Lingual Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2006 campaign. The development stages of our cross-lingual Question Answering (QA) system are described incrementally throughout the paper, at the same time pinpointing the problems that occurred and the way they were addressed. Our system adheres to the classical architecture for QA systems, debuting with question processing followed, after term translation, by information retrieval and answer extraction. Besides the common QA difficulties, the track posed some specific problems, such as the lack of a reliable translation engine from Romanian to English, and the need to evaluate each module individually for a better insight into the system’s failures.