Prodicos Experiment Feedback for QA@CLEF2006.
Emmanuel Desmontils, Christine Jacquin, Laura Monceaux · CLEF (Working Notes) · 2006
We present the second version of the Prodicos query answering system which was developed by the TALN team from the LINA institute. We have participated to the monolingual evaluation task dedicated to the French language. We firstly present the question analysis step which makes it possible to extract many features from the questions (question category, question type, question focus, answer type, ...). For this new campaign, new features are extracted from the questions in order to improve the passage selection process (named entities, noun phrases and dates). We also determine four dierent strategies that will be used during the answer extraction step (entity named strategy, numerical entity strategy, acronym definition strategy, pattern-based strategy). We also take into account a new category of question (lists). We then present the passage selection process whose goal is to extract from the journalistic corpora the most relevant passages which answer to the question. This year, we present a new strategy applied to definitional queries. We use external knowledge (Wikipedia encyclopedia) to add information to these kinds of questions. Then, we discuss, in details, the major improvements made on our system at the answer extraction module level. According to the strategies determined during the question analysis stage, we present the 4 dierent strategies applied to this step. We present, in details and independently, each strategy and their use context. Afterwards, for the passage selection and answer extraction modules, the evaluation is put forward to justify the results obtained.