The QUANTUM Question Answering System at TREC 11.
Luc Plamondon, Guy Lapalme, Leila Kosseim · Text REtrieval Conference · 2002
This year, we participated to the Question Answering task for the second time with the QUANTUM system. We entered 2 runs for the main task (one using the web, the other without) and 1 run for the list task (without the web). We essentially built on last year’s experience to enhance the system. The architecture of QUANTUM is mainly the same as last year: it uses patterns that rely on shallow parsing techniques and regular expressions to analyze the question and then select the most appropriate extraction function. This extraction function is then applied to one-paragraph long passages retrieved by Okapi to extract and score candidate answers. Among the novelties we added to QUANTUM this year is a web module that finds exact answers using high-precision reformulation of the question to anticipate the expected context of