The Senso Question Answering System at QA@CLEF 2008

The University of ´ Evora participation in QA@CLEF2008 was focused on the Portuguese monolingual task and was based on the updated Senso Question Answering System. This system uses a local knowledge base, providing semantic information for text search terms expansion. The solver module uses two components to collect plausible answers: the logic and the ad-hoc solvers. The logic solver starts by producing a FirstOrder Logic expression representing the question and a logic facts list representing the texts information and then it looks for answers within the facts list that unify and validate the question logic form. The ad-hoc solver is designed for cases where the answer can be directly detected in the text. Then all the results are merged for answer list validation, to filter and adjust answers weight. The submitted run had only single answers (the system best answer). The overall accuracy was 46.5% and the overall Confidence Weighted Score was 0.23979. This paper has an overview of the system and its approach to QA@CLEF.