Combining Linguistic Processing and Web Mining for Question Answering: ITC-irst at TREC 2004

This paper describes the work we have been done in the last year on the DIOGENE Question Answering system developed at ITC-Irst. We present two preliminary experiments showing the possibility of integrating into DIOGENE a textual entailment engine based on entailment rules. We addressed the problem proposing both a methodology for acquiring rules from the Web and a matching algorithm for comparing dependency trees derived from the question and from documents. Although the overall results are not high, we consider this year participation at TREC as an intermediate step in view of a more complete and in depth integration of textual entailment rules into the system. We also report about the problems we encountered in maintaining the Web-based answer validation modul