Question Answering System for the French Language

This paper describes our first participation in the QA@CLEF monolingual and bilingual task, where our objective was to propose a question answering system designed to respond to French queries submitted to search French documents. We wanted to combine a classic information retrieval model (based on the Okapi probabilistic model) with a linguistic approach based mainly on syntactic analysis. In order to utilize our monolingual system in the bilingual task, we automatically translated into French queries written in seven other source languages, namely Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English and Bulgarian.