We present in this chapter the QALC system which has participated in the four TREC QA evaluations. We focus here on the problem of linguistic variation in order to be able to relate questions and answers. We present first, variation at the term level which consists in retrieving questions terms in document sentences even if morphologic, syntactic or semantic variations alter them. Our second subject matter concerns variation at the sentence level that we handle as different partial reformulations of questions. Questions are associated with extraction patterns based on the question syntactic type and the object that is under query. We present the whole system thus allowing situating how QALC deals with variation, and different evaluations.
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Grau, B. et al. (2008). Coping With Alternate Formulations Of Questions And Answers. In: Strzalkowski, T., Harabagiu, S.M. (eds) Advances in Open Domain Question Answering. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4746-6_6
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