Traditional question answering systems typically employ a single pipeline architecture, consisting roughly of three components: question analysis, search, and answer selection (see e.g., (Clarke et al., 2001a; Hovy et al., 2000; Moldovan et al., 2000; Prager et al., 2000)). The knowledge sources utilized by these systems to date primarily focus on the corpus from which answers are to be retriev...

We describe our participation in the TREC 2005 Question Answering track; our main focus this year was on improving our multi-stream approach to question answering and on making a first step towards a question answering-as-XML retrieval strategy. We provide a detailed account of the ideas underlying our approaches to the QA task, report on our results, and give a summary of our findings.

Small enterprises are beginning to utilize Geographic Information Systems (GISs) and spatial technologies. Since these technologies have only recently become widely available for small enterprises, there are challenges including costs, training, skilled workforce, data gathering and management, and competitive strategy. Two conceptual theories of GIS strategy are discussed with respect to small...