Using syntactic knowledge for QA

We describe the system of the University of Groningen for the monolingual Dutch and multilingual English to Dutch QA tasks. First, we give a brief outline of the architecture of our QA-system, which makes heavy use of syntactic information. Next, we describe the modules that were improved or developed especially for the CLEF tasks, among others incorporation of syntactic knowledge in IR, incorporation of lexical equivalences and coreference resolution, and a baseline multilingual (English to Dutch) QA system, which uses a combination of Systran and Wikipedia (for term recognition and translation) for question translation. For non-list questions, 31% (20%) of the highest ranked answers returned by the monolingual (multilingual) system were correct.