Evaluation of Complex Temporal Questions in CLEF-QA

This paper presents the evaluation of a Temporal QA system for the treatment of temporal complex questions. The system was implemented as a multilayered architecture where complex temporal questions are first decomposed into simple questions, according to the temporal relations expressed in the original question. These simple questions are then processed independently by our standard Question Answering engine and their respective answers are filtered to accomplish each simple question temporal restrictions. Finally, answers to simple decomposed questions are integrated following the temporal relations extracted from the original complex question in order to compose the final answer. This evaluation was performed as a pilot task at the Spanish QA Track from the Cross Language Evaluation Forum 2004.