Approaching Question Answering by means of Paragraph Validation

In this paper we describe the system we developed for taking part in monolingual Spanish and English tasks at ResPubliQA 2009. Our system was composed by an IR phase focused on improving QA results, a validation step for removing not promising paragraphs and a module based on ngrams overlapping for selecting the final answer. Furthermore, a selection module that used lexical entailment and ngram overlapping was developed in English. While the IR module has achieved very promising results, the performance of the validation module has to be improved. On the other hand, the ngram ranking improved the one given by the IR module and it worked better for English than for Spanish. Finally, the ranking was slightly improved when lexical entailment was used