A Multi-agent Approach to Question Answering

In this paper we present a multi-agent approach to question answering for the Portuguese language. Our proposal is composed by three modules: (1) document and query processing; (2) ontology construction; and (3) answer generation. Each module is composed by multiple cooperative agents which adopt distinct strategies to generate its outputs and cooperate to create a global result. This approach allows the use of different strategies and the reduction of errors introduced by individual methods. The cooperation among the agents aims to reach better solutions in each step of the processing.

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