The DIOGENE Question Answering System ad CLEF-2004

This paper presents the ITC-irst Multilingual Question Answering system DIOGENE. The system was used successfully on the CLEF-2003, TREC-2003, TREC-2002 and TREC-2001 QA tracks. DIOGENE relies on a classical three-layer architecture: question processing, document retrieval, answer extraction and validation. DIOGENE uses MultiWordNet [Pianta et al. 2002] (http://multiwordnet.itc.it) which facilitates the transfer of knowledge between languages. For answer validation we used the Web. This year we used also a set of linguistic templates for answering specific questions like definition questions, location questions, and a subset of who-is and what-is questions. DIOGENE participated in both monolingual Italian-Italian task and in the cross-language Italian-English task. A co-operative participation together with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences was carried out in the cross-language Bulgarian-English QA task.