Retrieving topically-relevant text passages in documents has been studied many times, but
finding non-factoid, multiple sentence answers to web queries is a different task that is …

This paper explores the role of information retrieval in answering “relationship” questions, a
new class complex information needs formally introduced in TREC 2005. Since information …

For the TREC 2004 Novelty track, UMass participated in all four tasks. Although finding
relevant sentences was harder this year than last, we continue to show marked …

Abstract Information retrieval systems have typically concentrated on retrieving a set of
documents which are relevant to a user's query. This paper describes a system that attempts …

Our goal is to automatically answer brief factual questions of the form``When was the Battle
of Hastings?''or``Who wrote The Wind in the Willows?''. Since the answer to nearly any such …

The MultiText system retrieves passages, rather than entire documents, that are likely to be
relevant to a particular topic. For all runs, we used the reciprocal of the length of each …

Traditional text retrieval systems return a ranked list of documents in response to a user's
request. While a ranked list of documents can be an appropriate response for the user …

The MultiText information retrieval system finds arbitrary passages of text, as opposed to
complete documents, that are likely to be relevant to a particular topic. Passage retrieval …

For the short, factoid questions in TREC, the query terms we get from the original questions
are either too brief or often do not contain most relevant information in the corpus. It will be …

Every day, millions of people use the internet to answer questions. Unfortunately, at present,
there is no simple and successful means to consistently accomplish this goal. One common …