ASQA: Academia Sinica Question Answering System for NTCIR-5 CLQA

We propose a hybrid architecture for the NTCIR-5 CLQA C-C (Cross Language Question Answering from Chinese to Chinese) Task. Our system, the Academia Sinica Question-Answering System (ASQA), outputs exact answers to six types of factoid question: personal names, location names, organization names, artifacts, times, and numbers. The architecture of ASQA comprises four main components: Question Processing, Passage Retrieval, Answer Extraction, and Answer Ranking. ASQA successfully combines machine learning and knowledge-based approaches to answer Chinese factoid questions, achieving 37.5% and 44.5% Top1 accuracy for correct, and correct+unsupported answers, respectively.