Answerfinder - question answering by combining lexical, syntactic and semantic information

We present a question answering system that combines information at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels, in the process to find and rank the candidate answer sentences. The candidate exact answers are extracted from the candidate answer sentences by means of a combination of information-extraction techniques (named entity recognition) and patterns based on logical forms. The system participated in the question answering track of TREC 2004.