First Evaluation of Esfinge – A Question Answering System for Portuguese [chapter]

Luís Costa
2005 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
In this paper I will start by describing Esfinge -a general domain Portuguese question answering system, and then the strategies I used to participate in the CLEF-2004 QA track. Then I will present and discuss the results obtained and finally describe some of the work planned for the near future. Esfinge With a question answering system we want, for a given question, that the system be able of returning answers with the help of an information repository. This task requires the processing of the
more » ... question and of the information repository. Existing systems use in this processing various linguistic resources like taggers, named entities extractors, semantic relations, dictionaries, thesauri, etc... Esfinge (http://acdc.linguateca.pt/Esfinge/) is based on the architecture described by Eric Brill in (Brill, 2003) . Brill tried to check the results that could be obtained by investing less in the resources to process the question and the information repository and more in the volume of the information repository itself. The Web, as the biggest free information repository that we know is a good candidate for these experiences. Brill's approach was never tried for Portuguese and this language is quite used in the Web (Aires & Santos, 2002) . The motivation to start developing Esfinge was to check the results that could be obtained by applying Brill's approach to Portuguese. The planned architecture has four modules:
doi:10.1007/11519645_51 fatcat:z3375wzgavatnjzpdhtd5xeihm