Question Answering with QED at TREC-2005

This report describes the system developed by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sydney for the TREC-2005 question answering evaluation exercise. The backbone of our question-answering platform is QED, a linguistically-principled QA system. We experimented with external sources of knowledge, such as Google and Wikipedia, to enhance the performance of QED, especially for reranking and off-line processing of the corpus. For factoid and list questions we performed significantly above the median accuracy score of all participating systems at TREC 2005