Going beyond traditional QA systems: challenges and keys in opinion question answering

The treatment of factual data has been widely studied in different areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, processing subjective information still poses important challenges. This paper presents research aimed at assessing techniques that have been suggested as appropriate in the context of subjective - Opinion Question Answering (OQA). We evaluate the performance of an OQA with these new components and propose methods to optimally tackle the issues encountered. We assess the impact of including additional resources and processes with the purpose of improving the system performance on two distinct blog datasets. The improvements obtained for the different combination of tools are statistically significant. We thus conclude that the proposed approach is adequate for the OQA task, offering a good strategy to deal with opinionated questions.This paper has been partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - Spanish Government (grant no. TIN2009-13391-C04-01), and Conselleria d'Educación - Generalitat Valenciana (grant no. PROMETEO/2009/119 and ACOMP/2010/286)

TAC 2011 MultiLing pilot overview

The Text Analysis Conference MultiLing Pilot of 2011 posed a multi-lingual summarization task to the summarization community, aiming to quantify and measure the performance of multi-lingual, multi-document summarization systems. The task was to create a 240–250 word summary from 10 news texts, describing a given topic. The texts of each topic were provided in seven languages (Arabic, Czech, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi) and each participant generated summaries for at least 2 languages. The evaluation of the summaries was performed using automatic (AutoSummENG, Rouge) and manual processes (Overall Responsiveness score). The participating systems were 8, some of which providing summaries across all languages. This paper provides a brief description for the collection of the data, the evaluation methodology, the problems and challenges faced, and an overview of participation and corresponding results

NEREA: Named entity recognition and disambiguation exploiting local document repositories

In this work, we describe the design, development, and deployment of NEREA (Named Entity Recognizer for spEcific Areas), an automatic Named Entity Recognizer and Disambiguation system, developed in collaboration with professional documentalists. The aim of NEREA is to keep accurate and current information about the entities mentioned in a local repository, and then support building appropriate infoboxes, setting out the main data of these entities. It achieves a high performance thanks to the use of classification resources belonging to the local database. With this aim, the system performs tasks of named entity recognition and disambiguation by using three types of knowledge bases: local classification resources, global databases like DBpedia, and its own catalog created by NEREA. The proposed method has been validated with two different datasets and its operation has been tested in English and Spanish. The working methodology is being applied in a real environment of a media with promising results