Relevance measures for question answering, The LIA at QA@CLEF-2006

International audienceThis article presents the first participation of the Avignon University Science Laboratory (LIA) to the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). LIA participated to the monolingual Question Answering (QA) track dedicated to the French language, and to the cross-lingual English to French QA track. After a description of the strategies used by our system to answer questions, an analysis of the results obtained is done in order to discuss and outline possible improvements. Two strategies were used: for factoid questions, answer candidates are identified as Named Entities and selected by using key terms density measures (" com-pactness "); on the other hand, for definition questions, our approach is based on detection of frequent appositive informational nuggets appearing near the focus