Design and Performance Analysis of a Factoid Question Answering System for Spontaneous Speech Transcriptions

This paper introduces a QA designed from scratch to handle speech transcriptions. The system’s strength is achieved by analyz-ing the speech transcriptions with a mix of IR-oriented methodolo-gies and a small number of robust NLP components. We evaluate the system on transcriptions of spontaneous speech from several 1-hour-long seminars and presentations and show that the system obtains encouraging performance. Index Terms: question answering, natural language processing 1