SMS Normalisation, Retrieval and Out-of-Domain Detection Approaches for SMS-Based FAQ Retrieval.

This paper gives an overview of DCU’s participation in the SMS-based FAQ Retrieval task at FIRE 2011. DCU submitted three runs for monolingual English experiments. The approach consisted of first transforming the noisy SMS queries into a normalised, corrected form. The normalised queries were then used to retrieve a ranked list of FAQs by combining the results from three different retrieval methods. Finally, using information from the retrieval results, out-of-domain (OOD) queries were identified and tagged. The results of our best run on the final test set were the highest of all 13 participating teams. Our FIRE submission retrieved 70.2% in-domain query answers correctly and 85.6% identified out-of-domain queries correctly.