Spoken QA based on a passage retrieval engine

This paper presents a Passage Retrieval-based approach for the development of spoken Question Answering systems. Question Answering can be seen as a particular aspect of Information Retrieval where the user's information need are not satisfied by means of a document, but by a portion of text. Currently, the performance of typical Question Answering systems is rather poor, if compared with other Information Retrieval tasks, however, it is predictable that these system will be used in combination with some speech interface when high precision will be achieved. The most important evaluation competitions for Question Answering, such as TREC and CLEF, still do not have a spoken Question Answering track, therefore this work presents a novel approach to this task in order to study the influence of recognition errors over Question Answering systems.