Question Answering at TREC-10

RelatoreMatteo Negri ITC-irst

In the last few years, under the promotion of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), there has been an increasing interest in information retrieval and related applications. The goal of the Question Answering (QA) track is to encourage research into systems that retrieve answers rather than documents in response to a natural language question, with a particular emphasis on systems that can function in unrestricted domains. This talk presents state of the art results emerging from the TREC 2001 edition. Alternative approaches to the construction of a QA architecture will be illustrated: the overview will range from systems that strongly rely on the use of the Web, systems that exploit the contribution of shallow techniques (e.g. the use of patterns) and systems based on a more 'traditional' linguistic approach.