Priberam's question answering system in QA@CLEF 2007

Abstract

This paper accounts for Priberam's participation in the monolingual question answering (QA) track of CLEF 2007. In previous participations, Priberam's QA system obtained encouraging results both in monolingual and cross-language tasks. This year we endowed the system with syntactical processing, in order to capture the syntactic structure of the question. The main goal was to obtain a more tuned question categorisation and consequently a more precise answer extraction. Besides this, we provided our system with the ability to handle topic-related questions and to use encyclopaedic sources like Wikipedia. The paper provides a description of the improvements made in the system, followed by the discussion of the results obtained in Portuguese and Spanish monolingual runs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.