NTCIR-6 CLQA Question Answering Experiments at the Tokyo Institute of Technology

In this paper we discuss our results from the 2006 NTCIR-6 CLQA task, subtasks 2a and 2b. We describe our language independent, data-driven approach to Japanese language question answering and our new document retrieval and answer projection method which resulted in a small performance gain in com-parison to earlier approaches. Using this method, we achieve a formal run score of 0.17 for the top answer with document support for subtask 2b. We achieve a less favorable score of 0.03 for the top answer for the cross language subtask 2a, however we attribute this primarily to deficiencies in third-party MT software utilized for translation. We argue that these results fur-ther validate our current approach to QA