The 2006 TREC Genomics evaluation focuses on document, passage and aspect retrieval in the genomics domain. The Erasmus Medical Center, TNO and University of Twente collaborated on an approach combining concept tagging (named entity recognition) and information retrieval based on statistical language models. Experiments on the 2004 collection show that document retrieval based on concepts could...

In this paper we describe the participation of the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia to the 2006 edition, which was focused on the comparison between a Passage Retrieval engine (JIRS) specifically aimed to the Question Answering task and a standard, general use search engine such as Lucene. JIRS is based on n-grams, Lucene on keywords. We participated in three monolingual tasks: Spanish, Ital...

Retrieving answer containing passages is a challenging task in Question Answering. In this paper, we describe a novel passage retrieval methodology using answer type profiles. Our methodology includes two steps: estimation and ranking. In the estimation step, answer type profiles are constructed from question-answer sentence pairs parallel corpus using a statistical alignment model. Each answer...

We describe details of our runs and the results obtained for the “IR for Spoken Documents (SpokenDoc) Task” at NTCIR-9. The focus of our participation in this task was the investigation of the use of segmentation methods to divide the manual and ASR transcripts into topically coherent segments. The underlying assumption of this approach is that these segments will capture passages in the transc...

The amount of publicly available biomedical literature has been growing rapidly in recent years, yet question answering systems still struggle to exploit the full potential of this source of data. In a preliminary processing step, many question answering systems rely on retrieval models for identifying relevant documents and passages. This paper proposes a weighted cosine distance retrieval sch...

The information retrieval (IR) community has investigated many different techniques to retrieve passages from large collections of documents for question answering (QA). In this paper, we specifically examine and quantitatively compare the impact of passage retrieval for QA using sliding windows and disjoint windows. We consider two different data sets, the TREC 2002–2003 QA data set, and 93 wh...

We developed a patent retrieval system with the corresponding very large number of patents from NTCIR6 Patent Retrieval Task. And we developed a method of refining and emphasizing query. Our retrieval system consisting of four PCs could make indices of all claims in specifications for ten years. Then we confirmed that the query emphasis was better mean average precision than merely query expans...

This paper describes an approach for the integration of linguistic information in passage retrieval in an open-source question answering system for Dutch. Annotation produced by the wide-coverage dependency parser Alpino is stored in multiple index layers to be matched with natural language question that have been analyzed by the same parser. We present a genetic algorithm to select features to...

In this paper we present a new Question Answering (QA) system based on redundancy and a new Passage Retrieval (PR) method oriented to QA. We suppose that in a large enough document collection we can find the answer to any question of several forms. Therefore, it is possible to find one or several sentences including the answers which contain part of the original questions. Next, we use Support ...

The Text Retrieval Conference∗ is an annual conference where researchers in information retrieval (IR) compare their systems on specified retrieval tasks through several tracks. This poster summarizes the work done by Kyoto University and the University ofMelbourne for the 2007 Genomics Track. We begin by briefly describing the track and then continue with a description of our method. We conclu...