AL 2001; CUI 2005) AS A TOOL TO HELP PASSAGE RE-TRIEVAL AND ANSWER...

al 2001; Cui 2005) as a tool to help passage re-

trieval and answer validation.

Current QA systems mentioned above and

represented at TREC have been developed to

answer one question at the time. This may par-

We will discuss later in this paper how to util-

tially be an artifact of the earlier TREC QA

ize the co-occurrence of answers to a series of

evaluations which used large sets of independent

questions in building a batch QA system. The

questions. It may also partially reflect the inten-

remainder of this paper is organized as follows.

tion of the current TREC QA Track that the

In the next section, we review the current tech-

question series introduced in TREC QA 2004

niques used in building an automatic QA system.

(Voorhees 2005) simulate an interaction with a