MIRACLE Question Answering System for Spanish at CLEF 2007

This paper describes the system developed by MIRACLE group to participate in the Spanish monolingual question answering task at QA@CLEF 2007. A basic subsystem, similar to our last year participation, was used separately for EFE and Wikipedia collection. Answers from the two subsystems are combined using temporal information from the questions and the collections. The system is also enhanced with a correference module that processes question series based on a few simple heuristics that constraint the structure of the dialogue. The analysis of the results show that the reuse of strategies for factoids is feasible but definitions would benefit from adaptation. Regarding questions series, our heuristics have good coverage but we should find alternatives to avoid error chaining from previous questions.