Bridging Languages for Question Answering: DIOGENE at CLEF 2003

Abstract. This paper presents the extension of the ITC-irst DIOGENE Question Answering system towards multilinguality. DIOGENE relies on a well tested three-components architecture built in the framework of our participation in the QA track at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2002). The novelty factors are represented by the enhancement of the system with language-specific tools targeted to the Italian language (e.g. a module in charge of the answer-type extraction, and a named entities recognizer) and the introduction of a module for the translation of Italian queries into English queries. The overall architecture of the extended system, as well as the results obtained in the CLEF-2003 Monolingual Italian and Bilingual Italian/English QA tracks will be presented and discussed throughout the paper.