Applying anaphora resolution to Question Answering and Information Retrieval systems

Information Retrieval (IR) and Question Answering (QA) systems currently ignore information referred anaphorically in documents. Nevertheless, these references hide important information whose analysis can contribute to improve both IR and QA systems performance. The main aim of this paper is to analyze benefits of solving pronominal anaphora for IR and QA tasks. A complete system has been developed for evaluating the effects of applying this technique. Evaluation demonstrates that performance improvements are obtained in both tasks when pronominal references are solved.