Question answering for spanish based on lexical and context annotation

Abstract

Question Answering has become a promising research field whose aim is to provide more natural access to the information than traditional document retrieval techniques. In this work, an approach centered in the use of context at a lexical level has been followed in order to identify possible answers to short factoid questions stated by the user in natural language. The methods applied at different stages of the system as well as an architecture for question answering are described. The evaluation of this approach was made following QA@CLEF03 criteria on a corpus of over 200,000 news in Spanish. The paper shows and discusses the results achieved by the system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.