Skip to main content

First Evaluation of Esfinge – A Question Answering System for Portuguese

  • Conference paper
Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images (CLEF 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3491))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 623 Accesses

Abstract

This paper starts by describing Esfinge, a general domain Portuguese question answering system that uses the redundancy available in the Web as an important resource to find its answers. The paper also presents the strategies employed to participate in CLEF-2004 and discusses the results obtained. Three different strategies were tested: searching the answers only in the CLEF document collection, searching the answers in the Web and using the CLEF document collection to confirm these answers and finally searching the answers only in the Web. The intriguing question of why the system performed better when joining the two information sources, even though it was designed for the Web is discussed; in this connection, different language varieties and some problems of Google are mentioned. The paper concludes describing some of the work planned for the near future.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Brill, E.: Processing Natural Language without Natural Language Processing. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2003. LNCS, vol. 2588, pp. 360–369. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Aires, R., Santos, D.: Measuring the Web in Portuguese. In: Euroweb 2002 conference, Oxford, UK, December 17-18, pp. 198–199 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Banerjee, S., Pedersen, T.: The Design, Implementation, and Use of the {N}gram {S}tatistic {P}ackage. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, Mexico City, February 2003, pp. 370–381 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Christ, O., Schulze, B.M., Hofmann, A., Koenig, E.: The IMS Corpus Workbench: Corpus Query Processor (CQP): User’s Manual. University of Stuttgart, March 8 (1999) (CQP V2.2)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Santos, D., Rocha, P.: Evaluating CETEMPúblico, a free resource for Portuguese. In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, July 9-11, pp. 442–449 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Simões, A.M., Almeida, J.J.: Jspell.pm - um módulo de análise morfológica para uso em Processamento de Linguagem Natural. In: Gonçalves, A., Correia, C.N. (eds.) Actas do XVII Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL 2001) (Lisboa, 2-4 Outubro 2001), APL Lisboa, pp. 485–495 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Brill, E., Lin, J., Banko, M., Dumais, S., Ng, A.: Data-Intensive Question Answering. In: Voorhees, E.M., Harman, D.K. (eds.) Information Technology: The Tenth Text Retrieval Conference, TREC 2001, pp. 393–400. NIST Special Publication 500-250 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Magnini, B., et al.: Overview of the CLEF 2004 Multilingual Question answering track. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B., et al. (eds.) CLEF 2004. LNCS, vol. 3491, pp. 371–391. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Aires, R., Manfrin, A., Aluísio, S.M., Santos, D.: What Is My Style? Stylistic features in Portuguese web pages according to IR users’ needs. In: Lino, M.T., Xavier, M.F., Ferreira, F., Costa, R., Silva, R. (eds.) Proceedings of LREC 2004, Lisboa, Portugal, May 26-28, pp. 1943–1946 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Costa, L. (2005). First Evaluation of Esfinge – A Question Answering System for Portuguese. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B. (eds) Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images. CLEF 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3491. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11519645_51

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11519645_51

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27420-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32051-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics