An analysis of question processing of English and Chinese for the NTCIR 5 cross-language question answering task

An important element in question answering systems is the analysis and interpretation of questions. Using the NTCIR 5 Cross-Language Question Answering (CLQA) question test set we demonstrate that the accuracy of deep question analysis is dependent on the quantity and suitability of the available linguistic resources. We further demonstrate that applying question analysis tools developed on monolingual training materials to questions translated Chinese-English and English-Chinese using machine translation produces much reduced effectiveness in interpretation of the question. This latter result indicates that question analysis for CLQA should primarily be conducted in the question language prior to translation