Abstract

The TextMap-TMT cross-language question answering system at USC-ISI was designed to answer Spanish questions from English documents. The system is fully automatic, including question translation from Spanish to English, question type determination, rewriting to generate expected answer structures, search in the target collection and on the Web as a side collection, and answer selection from among the plausible candidates that were found. A development test collection with answer patterns for 100 questions in English and Spanish was used to assess the effect of question translation on each processing stage, and some adjustments were made to the question translation process to minimize these effects. Two runs were submitted, both of which sought to return exact answers. For the better of the two runs (which omitted an additional Web-based answer validation stage), the top-ranked answer …

Date

January 9, 2026

Authors

Abdessamad Echihabi, Douglas W Oard, Daniel Marcu, Ulf Hermjakob

Conference

Comparative Evaluation of Multilingual Information Access Systems: 4th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2003, Trondheim, Norway, August 21-22, 2003, Revised Selected Papers 4

Pages

514-522

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg