ITC-irst at TREC 2003: the DIOGENE QA System

This paper describes a new version of the DIOGENE Question Answering (QA) system developed at ITC-Irst. The recent updates here presented are targeted to the participation to TREC-2003 and meet the specific requirements of this year’s QA main task. In particular, extending the backbone already developed for our participation to the last two editions of the QA track, special attention was paid to deal with the principal novelty factors of the new challenge, namely the introduction of the so-called definition and list questions. Moreover, we experimented with a first attempt to integrate parsing as a deeper linguistic analysis technique to find similarities between the syntactic structure of the input questions and the retrieved text passages. The outcome of such experiments, as well as the variations of the system’s architecture and the results achieved at TREC-2003 will be presented in the following section