We present a system which retrieves answers to queries based on term weighting supplemented by coreference relationships between entities in a document. An evaluation of this system is given which demonstrates that the coreference relationships allov~ significantly more questions to be answered than with a baseline system which doesn’t model these relationships.

The need of having a Passage Retrieval (PR) system for Arabic texts is due essentially to our aim to build an Arabic Question Answering (QA) system in our research team. We have chosen working on the PR system to be our first step to pursue our aim because being the core component and its quality will affect directly the performance of the QA system. JAVA Information Retrieval System (JIRS) is ...

A system is described that uses a mixed-level representation of (part of) the meaning of natural language documents (based on standard Horn Clause Logic) and a variable-depth search strategy that distinguishes between the different levels of abstraction in the knowledge representation to locate specific passages in the documents. Mixed-level representations as well as variabledepth search strat...

This article describes the participation of the joint Elhuyar-IXA group in the ResPubliQA exercise at QA&CLEF. In particular, we participated in the English–English monolingual task and in the Basque–English crosslingual one. Our focus has been threefold: (1) to check to what extent information retrieval (IR) can achieve good results in passage retrieval without question analysis and answer val...

This study investigated whether information retrieval can be improved if documents are divided into smaller subdocuments or passages, and the retrieval score for these passages are incorporated in the final retrieval score for the whole document. The documents were segmented by sliding a window of a certain size across the document. Each time the window stopped, it displayed/extracted a certain...

Business analysis activity often involves the identification and extraction of information from business reports. The unstructured content of business reports poses a challenge to current Business Intelligence technologies. In this paper, we present an application that provides passage retrieval capability, which has been developed for use in business analysis activity at Hewlett-PackardTM (HP)...

This paper gives an overview of the INEX 2008 Ad HocTrack. The main goals of the Ad Hoc Track were two-fold. The first goalwas to investigate the value of the internal document structure (as pro-vided by the XML mark-up) for retrieving relevant information. This isa continuation of INEX 2007 and, for this reason, the retrieval resultsare liberalized to arbitrary passages and...

Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is a promising technology for enhancing the utility of spoken materials. After the spoken documents have been transcribed by using a Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) decoder, a text-based ad hoc retrieval method can be applied directly to the transcribed documents. However, recognition errors will significantly degrade the retrieval performa...

We consider the retrieval of XML-structured documents, and of passages from such documents, defined as elements of the XML structure. These are considered from the point of view of passage retrieval, as a form of document retrieval. A retrievable unit (an element chosen as defining suitable passages for retrieval) is a textual document in its own right, but may inherit information from the othe...