The aim of this paper is to investigate
how much the effectiveness of a Question
Answering (QA) system was affected
by the performance of Machine
Translation (MT) based question translation.
Nearly 200 questions were selected
from TREC QA tracks and ran through a
question answering system. It was able to
answer 42.6% of the questions correctly
in a monolingual run. These questions
were then translated manually from English
into Arabic and back into English using
an MT system, and then re-applied to
the QA system. The system was able to
answer 10.2% of the translated questions.
An analysis of what sort of translation error
affected which questions was conducted,
concluding that factoid type
questions are less prone to translation error
than others
