Morphological resources for precise information retrieval

International audienceQuestion answering (QA) systems aim at providing a precise answer to a given user question. Their major difficulty lies in the lexical gap problem between question and answering passages. We present here the different types of morphological phenomena in question answering, the resources available for French, and in particular a resource that we built containing deverbal agent nouns. Then, we evaluate the results of a particular QA system, according to the morphological knowledge used

Question Generation for French: Collating Parsers and Paraphrasing Questions

This article describes a question generation system for French. The transformation of declarative sentences into questions relies on two different syntactic parsers and named entity recognition tools. This makes it possible to further diversify the questions generated and to possibly alleviate the problems inherent to the analysis tools. The system also generates reformulations for the questions based on variations in the question words, inducing answers with different granularities, and nominalisations of action verbs. We evaluate the questions generated for sentences extracted from two different corpora: a corpus of newspaper articles used for the CLEF Question Answering evaluation campaign and a corpus of simplified online encyclopedia articles. The evaluation shows that the system is able to generate a majority of good and medium quality questions. We also present an original evaluation of the question generation system using the question analysis module of a question answering system

Analysis of automatic translation of questions for question-answering systems

Multilingual question-answering systems can provide users with specific data in response to queries by searching for a minimal fragment of text that applies to the query, regardless of the language in which the question is formulated and the answer is found. The aim of this paper is to analyse the automatic translation of questions (intended as queries input to a cross-language, question-answering system) from German and French into the Spanish language. Method. The methodology used for evaluation, based on automatic and subjective measures, appraises whether the translation will serve as input to a system. That is, does the question retain its validity and fulfil its function, allowing a proper response to be found? Analysis. The main features of multilingual question-answering systems are described and then we analyse the effectiveness of the translations achieved through three popular online translating tools: Google Translator, Promt and Worldlingo. Results. Our findings serve to identify which is the most reliable translator for both pairs of languages overall. However, an even more reliable option would be to use two different translators, depending on which of the two source languages is being dealt with. Conclusions. The results contribute to the realm of innovative search systems by enhancing our understanding of online translators and their potential in the context of multilingual information retrieval

Analysis of automatic translation of questions for question-answering systems

Introduction. Multilingual question-answering systems can provide users with specific data in response to queries by searching for a minimal fragment of text that applies to the query, regardless of the language in which the question is formulated and the answer is found. The aim of this paper is to analyse the automatic translation of questions (intended as queries input to a cross-language, question-answering system) from German and French into the Spanish language. Method. The methodology used for evaluation, based on automatic and subjective measures, appraises whether the translation will serve as input to a system. That is, does the question retain its validity and fulfil its function, allowing a proper response to be found? Analysis. The main features of multilingual question-answering systems are described and then we analyse the effectiveness of the translations achieved through three popular online translating tools: Google Translator, Promt and Worldlingo. Results. Our findings serve to identify which is the most reliable translator for both pairs of languages overall. However, an even more reliable option would be to use two different translators, depending on which of the two source languages is being dealt with. Conclusions. The results contribute to the realm of innovative search systems by enhancing our understanding of online translators and their potential in the context of multilingual information retrieval

Question answering on web data : the QA evaluation in Quaero

International audienceIn the QA and information retrieval domains, progress has been assessed via evaluation campaigns(Clef, Ntcir, Equer, Trec). In these evaluations, the systems handle independent questions and should provide one answer to each question, extracted from textual data, for both open domain and restricted domain. Quæro is a program promoting research and industrial innovation on technologies for automatic analysis and classification of multimedia and multilingual documents. Among the many research areas concerned by Quæro. The Quaero project organized a series of evaluations of Question Answering on Web Data systems in 2008 and 2009. For each language, English and French the full corpus has a size of around 20Gb for 2.5M documents. We describe the task and corpora, and especially the methodologies used in 2008 to construct the test of question and a new one in the 2009 campaign. Six types of questions were addressed, factual, Non-factual(How, Why, What), List, Boolean. A description of the participating systems and the obtained results is provided. We show the difficulty for a question-answering system to work with complex data and questions

FRASQUES : A Question-Answering System in the EQueR Evaluation Campaign

à paraîtreInternational audienceQuestion-answering (QA) systems aim at providing either a small passage or just the answer to a question in natural language. We have developed several QA systems that work on both English and French. This way, we are able to provide answers to questions given in both languages by searching documents in both languages also. In this article, we present our French monolingual system FRASQUES which participated in the EQueR evaluation campaign of QA systems for French in 2004. First, the QA architecture common to our systems is shown. Then, for every step of the QA process, we consider which steps are language-independent, and for those that are language-dependent, the tools or processes that need to be adapted to switch for one language to another. Finally, our results at EQueR are given and commented; an error analysis is conducted, and the kind of knowledge needed to answer a question is studied

Multilingual Question-Answering System in Biomedical Domain on the Web: An Evaluation

Question-answering systems (QAS) are presented as an alternative to traditional systems of information retrieval, intended to offer precise responses to factual questions. An analysis has been made of the results offered by the QA multilingual biomedical system HONqa, available on the Web. The study has used a set of 120 biomedical definitional questions (What is...?), taken from the medical website WebMD, which were formulated in English, French, and Italian. The answers have been analysed using a serie of specific measures (MRR, TRR, FHS, precision, MAP). The study confirms that for all the languages analysed the functioning effectiveness needs to be improved, although in the multilingual context analysed the questions in the English language achieve better results for retrieving definitional information than in French and Italian

Multilingual Question-Answering System in Biomedical Domain on the Web: An Evaluation

Question-answering systems (QAS) are presented as an alternative to traditional systems of information retrieval, intended to offer precise responses to factual questions. An analysis has been made of the results offered by the QA multilingual biomedical system HONqa, available on the Web. The study has used a set of 120 biomedical definitional questions (What is...?), taken from the medical website WebMD, which were formulated in English, French, and Italian. The answers have been analysed using a serie of specific measures (MRR, TRR, FHS, precision, MAP). The study confirms that for all the languages analysed the functioning effectiveness needs to be improved, although in the multilingual context analysed the questions in the English language achieve better results for retrieving definitional information than in French and Italian

Pro-capitalism vs. Anti-americanism in 21st century Europe product in Romania

The topic of this article was inspired by a recent survey, carried out in several Western European countries, with the purpose of ascertaining the public’s expectations regarding the respective countries’ (and Europe’s) economic prospects for the first half of the 21st century. The questions were focused upon two chief issues: (1) Europe’s economic future within the context of contemporary global transformations; (2) the viability of the European economic systems. Concerning the former issue, one of the questions read: “Are you optimistic, pessimistic or neutral about the future of your country’s economy?” The French, Spaniards, Italians and even residents of the United States were rather skeptical at this point, the only optimistic being the Germans. To the question: “Do you think the European economy can compete effectively against other rising economies in Asia, such as China and India?”, distrust was even higher; over two thirds of the French interviewees gave a negative response. In the other countries, the skeptics’ share was lower but still higher than of those who answered affirmatively. If the above-mentioned answers could have, to a certain extent, been intuited, the questions regarding the latter issue yielded less predictable results. The subjects were asked to express a double option: between the capitalist economic system and other types of systems, on the one hand; between the European system of capitalism (admitting there is such a thing) and the American one, on the other hand. To the question: “Do you think a free-market, capitalist economy is the best economic system or not?”, the majority of the interviewees (48 percent of the Germans, 49 percent of the Spaniards …etc.) gave affirmative answers, whereas regarding the type of capitalism they wished, most of the questioned European citizens rejected the United States’ economic system. Why is Europe pro-capitalist? It is most likely because its prosperity owes much more to capitalism that to any other economic system. Of no less importance is the fact that all of the practical experiments of socialism have wound up in complete failure so far. In spite of that, the ideological dispute between capitalism and socialism has known a remarkable revival lately, a number of reputed scholars trying to demonstrate that both systems possess viable elements that is worth transmitting to the future. Why is Europe anti-American? Answering this question is a bit more difficult. In the following pages, I’ll try to find some possible explanations.

Re-ranking of Yahoo snippets with the JIRS passage retrieval system

Comunicación presentada en: Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access, CLIA-2007, 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-07, Hyderabad, India, January 6-12, 2007Passage Retrieval (PR) systems are used as first step of the actual Question Answering (QA) systems. Usually, PR systems are traditional information retrieval systems which are not oriented to the specific problem of QA. In fact, these systems only search for the question keywords. JIRS Distance Density n-gram system is a QA-oriented PR system which has given good results in QA tasks when this is applied over static document collections. JIRS is able to search for the question structure in the document collection in order to find the passages with the greatest probability to contain the answer. JIRS is a language-independent PR system which has been already adapted to a few non-agglutinative European languages (such as Spanish, Italian, English and French) as well as to the Arabic language. A first attempt to adapt it to the Urdu Indian language was also made. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of basing on the web the JIRS retrieval of passages. The experiments we carried out show that JIRS allow to improve the coverage of the correct answers re-ranking the snippets obtained with Yahoo search engine.ICT EU-India; TEXT-MESS CICY