The role of lexical features in question answering for Spanish

Abstract

This paper describes the prototype developed in the Language Technologies Laboratory at INAOE for the Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task at CLEF 2005. The proposed approach copes with the QA task according to the type of question to solve (factoid or definition). In order to identify possible answers to factoid questions, the system applies a methodology centered in the use of lexical features. On the other hand, the system is supported by a pattern recognition method in order to identify answers to definition questions. The paper shows the methods applied at different stages of the system, with special emphasis on those used for answering factoid questions. Then the results achieved with this approach are discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.