Robust Question Answering for Speech Transcripts: UPC Experience in QAst 2008

This paper describes the participation of the Technical University of Catalonia in the CLEF 2008 Question Answering on Speech Transcripts track. We have participated in the English and Spanish scenarios of QAst. For the processing of manual transcripts we have deployed a robust factual Question Answering that uses minimal syntactic information. For the handling of automatic transcripts we combine the QA system with a Passage Retrieval and Answer Extraction engine based on a sequence alignment algorithm that searches for "sounds like" sequences. We perform a detailed analysis of our results and draw conclusions relating QA performance to word error rate (WER) in transcripts. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.4 Systems and Software; H.3.7 Digital Libraries; H.2.3 [Database Management]: Languages--Query Languages General Terms Measurement, Performance, Expe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Pere Comas, Jordi Turmo
• Keywords: CLEF 2008, Clef 2008 Question, Information Management, Question Answering, Transcripts