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<Paper uid="W06-1902">
  <Title>The Affect of Machine Translation on the Performance of Arabic- English QA System</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The aim of this paper is to investigate how much the effectiveness of a Question Answering (QA) system was affected by the performance of Machine Translation (MT) based question translation. Nearly 200 questions were selected from TREC QA tracks and ran through a question answering system. It was able to answer 42.6% of the questions correctly in a monolingual run. These questions were then translated manually from English into Arabic and back into English using an MT system, and then re-applied to the QA system. The system was able to answer 10.2% of the translated questions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> An analysis of what sort of translation error affected which questions was conducted, concluding that factoid type questions are less prone to translation error than others.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>