Priberam's Question Answering System in QA@CLEF 2008

This paper describes the changes implemented in Priberam's question answering (QA) system, followed by the discussion of the results obtained in Portuguese and Spanish monolingual runs at QA@CLEF 2008. We enhanced the syntactic analysis of the question and improved the indexing process by using question categories at the sentence retrieval level. The fine-tuning of the syntactic analysis allowed the system to more precisely match the pivots of the question with their counterparts in the answer. As a result, in QA CC, CLEF 2008, Priberam's system achieved a considerable overall accuracy increase in the Portuguese run.