University of Alicante at WiQA 2006

This paper presents the participation of University of Alicante at the WiQA pilot task organized as part of the CLEF 2006 campaign. For a given set of topics, this task presupposes the discovery of important novel information distributed across different Wikipedia entries. The approach we adopted for solving this task uses Information Retrieval, query expansion by feedback, novelty re-ranking, as well as temporal ordering. Our system has participated both in the Spanish and English monolingual tasks. For each of the two participations the results are promising because, by employing a language independent approach, we obtain scores above the average. Moreover, in the case of Spanish, our result is very close to the best achieved score. Apart from introducing our system, the present paper also provides an in-depth result analysis, and proposes future lines of research, as well as follow-up experiments.