Cross-Language French-English Question Answering Using the DLT System at CLEF 2003

We describe the system built by the Documents and Linguistic Technology (DLT) Group at University of Limerick for participation in the French-English Question Answering Task of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The starting point was our monolingual 2002 TREC system to which was added query classification working in French, machine translation of the query into English, and search of the document collection using a commercial engine. We then present the results of the runs carried out with this system before discussing our findings and proposed next steps.