20th century Esfinge (Sphinx) solving the riddles at CLEF 2005

Abstract

Esfinge is a general domain Portuguese question answering system. It tries to take advantage of the steadily growing and constantly updated information freely available in the World Wide Web in its question answering tasks. The system participated last year for the first time in the monolingual QA track. However, the results were compromised by several basic errors, which were corrected shortly after. This year, Esfinge participation was expected to yield better results and allow experimentation with a Named Entity Recognition System, as well as try a multilingual QA track for the first time. This paper describes how the system works, presents the results obtained by the official runs in considerable detail, as well as results of experiments measuring the import of different parts of the system, by reporting the decrease in performance when the system is executed without some of its components/features. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.