Lymba's PowerAnswer 4 in TREC 2007

Abstract

This paper reports on Lymba Corporation’s (a spinoff of Language Computer Corporation) participation in the TREC 2007 Question Answering track. An overview of the PowerAnswer 4 question answering system and a discussion of new features added to meet the challenges of this year’s evaluation are detailed. Special attention was given to methods for incorporating blogs into the searchable collection, methods for improving answer precision, both statistical and knowledge driven, new mechanisms for recognizing named entities, events, and time expressions, and updated pattern-driven approaches to answer definition questions. Lymba’s results in the evaluation are presented at the end of the paper.