Focus definition and extraction of opinion attitude questions

Abstract

In Question Answering Systems (QAS), Question Analysis is an important task that consists in general in identifying the semantic type of the question and extracting the question focus. In this context, and as part of a framework aiming to implement an Arabic opinion QAS for political debates, this paper addresses the problem of defining the focus of opinion attitude questions and proposes an approach for extracting it. The proposed approach is based on semi-automatically constructed lexico-syntactic patterns. Evaluation results are considered very encouraging with an average precision of around 87.37%. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.