An Overview of Question Answering at Tokyo Institute of Technology

In this paper1, we give an overview of the data-driven and non-linguistic approach to open-domain factoid question answering (QA) that has been developed over the past 4 years at Tokyo Institute of Technology and which culminated this year in our participation in three international evaluations of QA technology at TREC (for English), CLEF (for Spanish and French) and NTCIR (for Japanese). In TREC2005 we placed 11th out of a total of 30 participants in the factoid QA task and in TREC2006 we came 9th out of 27 participants with an accuracy of 25.1%. While our performance in the official CLEF QA tracks was poor due to a large number of unsupported answers, the performance on an informal “real-time” Spanish QA exercise was one of the best. At the time of writing no results have yet been released for Japanese.