Mining Knowledge from repeated Co-occurrences: DIOGENE at TREC-2002

This paper presents a new version of the DIOGENE Question Answering (QA) system developed at ITC-Irst. With respect to our first participation to the TREC QA main task (TREC-2001), the system presents both improvements and extensions. On one hand, significant improvements rely on the substitution of basic components (e.g. the search engine and the tool in charge of the named entities recognition) with new modules that enhanced the overall system’s performance. On the other hand, an effective extension of DIOGENE is represented by the introduction of a module for the automatic assessment of the candidate answers ’ quality. All the variations with respect to the first version of the system as well as the results obtained at the TREC-2002 QA main task are presented and discussed in the paper