Contextual approach for paragraph selection in question answering task

This year we participated in the English monolingual paragraph selection task at ResPubliQA 2010. Our general strategy is to find the supporting word context from query and candidate passages during the paragraph selection. We use the techniques of state-of-the art publicly available question answering systems, i.e. Open Ephyra and JIRS, and the random projection implementation in the Semantic Vectors package to evaluate the word context. To strengthen the paragraph selection, besides the context evaluation, we also use n-gram overlapping and textual containment. Our approach has a c@1 measure of 0.73 for our pattern-based context configuration and 0.64 for our n-gram-based context configuration.