Multilingual Question Answering through Intermediate Translation: LCC's PowerAnswer at QA@CLEF 2007

This paper reports on Language Computer Corporation's QA@CLEF 2007 preparation, participation and results. For this exercise, LCC integrated its open-domain PowerAnswer Question Answering system with its statistical Machine Translation engine. For 2007, LCC participated in the English-to-French and English-to-Portuguese cross-language tasks. The approach is that of intermediate translation, only processing English within the QA system regardless of the input or source languages. The output snippets were then mapped back into the source language documents for the final output of the system and submission. What follows is a description of the improved system and methodology and updates from QA@CLEF 2006.