MITRE's Qanda at TREC 14.
John D. Burger, Lisa Ferro, Warren R. Greiff, John C. Henderson, Marc Light, Scott Mardis, Alex A. Morgan · 2002
Qanda is MITRE's TREC-style question answering system. Since last year's evaluation, principal improvements to the system have been aimed at making it faster and more robust. We discuss the current architecture of the system in Section 1. Some work has gone into better answer formation and ranking, which we discuss in Section 2. After this year's evaluation, we have done a number of ROVER-style system combination experiments using the judged answer strings made available by NIST. We report on some success with this in Section 3. We have also performed a detailed categorization of previous TREC results according to answer type and grammatical category, as well as an analysis of Qanda's own question analysis component -- see Section 4 for these analyses.