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<Paper uid="W06-1903">
  <Title>Cross-Cutting Aspects of Cross-Language Question Answering Systems</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Different projects, different evaluation forums, different tasks, different languages, different document collections, different question types, different answer processing strategies ... Anyone familiar with all these concepts knows the complexity and what a daunting prospect of developing a QA-System easily adaptable to ever changing requirements this might be. We have started off with a &amp;quot;prototype-and-go&amp;quot; approach, trying to keep pace with the emergence of new tasks and managing the scarcity of your time and of your resources, to realize later on that what we had is a bunch of prototypes very tuned to their task requirements. Trying to adapt them to new requirements seemed often more difficult then starting off with a new one. Therefore we started looking for an alternative, which should be more flexible and should allow us to cover much more requirements' variations; in other words we were considering putting together a Question Answering framework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In the rest of the paper we will shortly overview the components of such a framework and will describe the relevant aspects of the solution offered for each of them, aspects that should account for a large variety of question types, document collections and answer processing techniques, as well as for several languages. We will continue with a discussion of two issues that cut across several components of the framework, namely: cross-linguality and answer credibility, and will conclude by shortly naming the domains of usage for the framework and future work.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>