Qanda and the Catalyst Architecture

Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Qanda is MITRE’s entry into the question-answering (QA) track of the TREC conference(Voorhees and Harman 2002). This year, Qanda was re-engineered to use a new architecture for human language technology called Catalyst, developed at MITRE for the DARPA TIDES program. The Catalyst architecture was chosen because it was specifically designed for fast processing and for combining the strengths of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NIP) into a single framework. These technology fields are critical to the development of QA sysictus. The current Qanda implementation serves as a prototype for developing QA systems in the Catalyst architecture. This paper serves as an introduction to Catalyst and the Qanda implementation.