Monolingual and Cross-language QA using a QA-oriented Passage Retrieval System

This report describes the work done by the RFIA group at the Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación of the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia for the 2005 edition of the CLEF Question Answering task. We participated in three monolingual tasks: Spanish, Italian and French, and in two cross-language tasks: spanish to english and english to spanish. Since this was our first participation, we focused our work on the passage-based search engine while using simple pattern matching rules for the Answer Extraction phase. As regards the cross-language tasks, we had resort to the most common web translation tools.