The MIRACLE Team at the CLEF 2008 Multilingual Question Answering Track

The MIRACLE team is a consortium formed by three universities from Madrid, (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and DAEADALUS, a small and medium size enterprise (SME). The MIRACLE team participated in the monolingual Spanish and cross-language French to Spanish subtasks at QA@CLEF 2008. For the Spanish subtask, we used an almost completely rebuilt version of our system, designed with the aim of flexibly combining information sources and linguistic annotators for different languages. To allow easy development for new languages, most of the modules don’t make any language dependent assumptions. This language dependent knowledge is encapsulated in a rule language developed within the MIRACLE team. By the time of submitting the runs, work on the new version was still ongoing, so we consider the results as a partial test of the possibilities of the new architecture. Subsystems for other languages were not yet available, so we tried a very simple approach for the French to Spanish subtask: questions were translated to Spanish with Babylon, and the output of this translation was fed into our system. The results were an accuracy of 16 % for the monolingual Spanish task and 5 % for the cross-language task