Cross-Lingual Question Answering Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Translation

We show how to adapt an existing monolingual open-domain QA system to perform in a cross-lingual environment, using off-the-shelf machine translation software. In our experiments we use French and German as source language, and English as target language. For answering factoid questions, our system performs with an accuracy of 16% (German to English) and 20% (French to English), respectively. The loss of correctly answered questions caused by the MT component is estimated at 10% for French, and 15% for German. The accuracy of our system on correctly translated questions is 28% for German and 29% for French.