Using a text summarization system for monolingual question answering

Abstract

In this paper, we present and analyze the results of the application of a text summarization system - GistSumm - to the task of monolingual question answering at CLEF 2006 for Portuguese texts. Using the system ability to produce topic-oriented summaries, we aimed at assessing its accuracy in finding answers to the posted questions, which were used as the topics for producing the corresponding summaries. The obtained results were very poor, indicating that simple summarization techniques alone are not enough for question answering.