A meta-information extractor for interrogative sentences

Abstract

The development of tools for Information Retrieval Systems or Expertise Finding Systems has a common task: the understanding of the information need. Since the information need is usually expressed through natural language, the computational processing of the information need involves several NLP techniques. Fortunately, there is a vast set of tools for English, but others languages have been marginalized. Thus, in this paper, we present a Web Service that offers to clients NLP treatment for interrogative sentences written in Brazilian Portuguese. The Web Service receives the question as input e returns its meta-information. The main differential of our proposal is that we offer a full analysis of the question text using a single function. We evaluate a feature of the Web Service named Category labeler, responsible for automatic discover the subject of the question, and we found that it has a true positive rate higher than 50% (α=10%).