Abstract

MONTES Y GOMEZ, Manuel; VILLASENOR PINEDA, Luis  and  LOPEZ LOPEZ, Aurelio. Mexican Experience in Spanish Question Answering. Comp. y Sist. [online]. 2008, vol.12, n.1, pp.40-64. ISSN 2007-9737.

Nowadays, due to the great advances in communication and storage media, there is more information available than ever before. This information can satisfy almost every information need; nevertheless, without the appropriate manage facilities, all of it is practically useless. This fact has motivated the emergence of several text processing applications that help in accessing large document collections. Currently, there are three main approaches for this purpose: information retrieval, information extraction, and question answering. Question answering (QA) systems aim to identify the exact answer to a question from a given document collection. This paper presents a survey of the Mexican experience in Spanish QA. In particular, it presents an overview of the participations of the Language Technologies Laboratory of INAOE (LabTL) in the Spanish QA evaluation task at CLEF, from 2004 to 2007. Through these participations, the LabTL has mainly explored two different approaches for QA: a language independent approach based on statistical methods, and a language dependent approach supported by sophisticated linguistic analyses of texts. It is important to point out that, due to these works, the LabTL has become one of the leading research groups in Spanish QA.

Keywords : Question Answering; Passage Retrieval; Answer Extraction; Machine Learning.