Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

IIS lab, led by Dr. Wen-Lian Hsu, won the first place in NTCIR Cross Language Question Answering System competition

The Intelligent Agent System Lab (IASL), lead by Dr. Wen-Lian Hsu, won the first place in NTCIR Cross Language Question Answering (CLQA) System competition. It is the second year for such a competition in NTCIR. The IASL team, with years of experience in developing QA system, won the first place with a precision of 54.7% in the Chinese-Chinese mono-lingual subtask and 33.3% in the English-Chinese cross-lingual subtask, which is substantially better than last year's best results, 44.5% and 12%, respectively. Compared to QA systems in some other languages, the precision of Chinese QA system is lower. One of the main reasons is the unknown word and word segmentation problem in Chinese. IASL will continue the work trying to incorporate rules or templates and other semantic resources to improve the performance of Chinese QA systems. The NTCIR Workshop held by NII in Japan, is one of the most important international conferences of information processing in Asia. The first annual meeting of NTCIR workshop was held in 1999. The competitions of 2006 include Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) Task, Patent Retrieval Task (PATENT), Question Answering Challenge (QAC), Multimodal Summarization (MuST) and Cross Language Question Answering (CLQA).