The University of Amsterdam at TAC 2008 Question Answering track

Abstract: We describe the participation of the University of Amsterdam’s ILPS group in the Question Answering track of the TAC 2008. We used a simple system based on lexicon-based identification of opinionated sentences and the answer extraction module of our factual question answering system. The results indicate that filtering out sentences that are unlikely to contain opinions does improve the end-to-end performance of the system. 1 System description Systems participating in the TAC 2008 Question Answering track were required to find precise answers to English questions in a large corpus of blogs (TREC Blog06 corpus). The test questions were opinionated: they asked either for lists of entities that are sources or targets of specific opinions (rigid list questions, such as Name US senators who support tax reform.) or for reasons and other details of specific opinions (squishy list questions, such as Why do countries want to have nuclear power plants?). For our participation, we used a simple system consisting of five modules: 1. Blog post retrieval: for every questions, we retrieved top 500 blog posts from th