Question answering system using query expansion and heuristic features

This paper describes the design of question answering system that participates in the maintask of QA4MRE at CLEF 2013. This system will ini-tially perform preprocessing stage of the document and the documents related questions. Then, it identifies the type of questions in order to be able to search the answers with the most appropriate approach. In order to finding the an-swers, the system uses eight heuristics features and two query expansion tech-niques, namely Pseudo Relevance feedback and WordNet as the lexical data-base. There are nine types of runs were submitted at CLEF 2013, where the dif-ference lies in the combination of query expansion techniques and features used. Evaluation will be based on the c@1 measure. Best results are obtained when it uses both query expansion techniques and all features with certain weights.