A QA system that can answer any class of Japanese non-factoid questions and its application to CCLQA EN-JA task — Yokohama National University at NTCIR-7 ACLIA CCLQA EN-JA

In this paper, we reported the evaluation results of our CCLQA system at NTCIR-7 ACLIA. We partici- pated in the English-Japanese (EN-JA) cross-lingual task and the Japanese mono-lingual task. The system consists of a question translation module and a non- factoid-type Japanese question-answering system. The question translation module was developed for NTCIR-6 CLQA, which is a combination of an off-the- shelf machine-translation product and a noun phrase translation module using web documents in order to compensate the insufficiencies in the bilingual dic- tionary of the MT product. With regard to the non- factoid-type Japanese question-answering system, we proposed a method of non-factoid question-answering that can uniformly deal with any class of Japanese non-factoid question by using a large number of ex- ample Q&A pairs. Keywords: EN-JA CCLQA, machine translation, noun phrase translation using the Web, Q&A pairs from a social Q&A website.