Off-line Answer Extraction for Dutch QA

In Jijkoun et al. [2004] we showed that off-line answer extraction using syntactic patterns is a successful method for answering English factoid questions. In this paper I will discuss the results of applying this method for Dutch question answering using the CLEF text collection parsed by the Alpino parser, a wide coverage dependency parser for Dutch. We defined syntactic patterns to extract answers to frequently occurring question types, such as function questions (Who is the president of the US?), location questions (Where is Groningen located?) and inhabitant questions (How many people live in Amsterdam?)