José María Guirao

MIRACLE’s cross-lingual question answering experiments with spanish as a target language

Our second participation in CLEF-QA consited in six runs with Spanish as a target language. The source languages were Spanish, English an Italian. miraQA uses a simple representation of the question that is enriched with semantic information like typed Named Entities. Runs used different strategies for answer extraction and selection, achieving at best a 25’5% accuracy. The analysis of the errors suggests that improvements in answer selection are the most critical.

A Study of Chunk-Based and Keyword-Based Approaches for Generating Headlines

This paper describes two procedures for generating very short summaries for documents from the DUC-2003 competition: a chunk extraction method based on syntactic dependences, and a simple keyword-based extraction. We explore different techniques for extraction and weighting chunks from the texts, and we draw conclusions on the evaluation metric used and the kind of features that are more useful. Two preliminary versions of this procedure ranked in the 12th and 13th positions with respect to unigram recall (ROUGE-1) at DUC-2004 (out of 39 runs submitted).

Relating linguistic units to socio-contextual information in a spontaneous speech corpus of Spanish

This chapter shows the application of statistical tests to a corpus of spontaneous spoken Spanish. Our goal is to find representative differences between different parts of the corpus. To this end, we tagged n-grams in the corpus with features related to the speaker (age, gender, etc.), or the context (dialogue, monologue, media, etc.), and applied the log-likelihood test (Dunning, 1993) in order to find the most distinctive lexical or grammatical items for each specific socio-contextual feature. This chapter is divided in three sections. In the first, the characteristics of the spoken corpus are shown. The second section is devoted to the explanation of the computational tool. In the third section, a first rough estimate of the results obtained is given, as well as possible applications of the model.