IdSay: Question Answering for Portuguese

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Gracinda Carvalho
Gracinda Carvalho

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Abstract

IdSay is an open domain Question Answering system for Portuguese that was developed from scratch. Its current version can be considered a baseline version, using mainly techniques from the area of Information Retrieval. The only external information that it uses besides the text collections is lexical information for Portuguese.

It was submitted to the monolingual Portuguese task of the Question Answering track of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum 2008 (QA@CLEF) for the first time, in which it answered correctly to 65 of the 200 questions in the first answer, and to 85 answers considering the three answers that could be returned per question.

Generally, the types of questions that are answered better by IdSay system are measure factoids, count factoids and definitions, but there is still work to be done in these areas, as well as in the treatment of time. List questions, location and people/organization factoids are the types of question with more room for evolution.