Robust Question Answering for Speech Transcripts: UPC Experience in QAst 2009

This paper describes the participation of the Technical University of Catalonia in the CLEF 2009 Question Answering on Speech Transcripts track. We have participated in the English and Spanish scenarios of QAst. For both manual and automatic tran-scripts we have used a robust factual Question Answering that uses minimal syntactic information. We have also developed a NERC designed to handle automatic tran-scripts. We perform a detailed analysis of our results and draw conclusions relating QA performance to word error rate and the difference between written and spoken questions