Improving Interaction with the User in Cross-Language Question Answering through Relevant Domains and Syntactic Semantic Patterns

The iCLEF 2004 experiment at the University of Alicante has focused on how to assist users in the localization of the correct answer in passages written in a language different from the one of the query. The language of the users is Spanish and the language of the documents/passages English. In order to help users, a first system shows, together with the passage in English, the relevant domains of the passage and the relevant domains of the query. These relevant domains were extracted automatically from WordNet Domains. A second system shows, together with the passage in English, the syntactic-semantic patterns (SSP) of each passage and the SSP of the query. The SSP are formed by the verb and the main nouns of a sentence (that is, the head nouns of the main complements). For users without deep knowledge or with low competence in English, our hypothesis is that to know the relevant domain and/or the SSP will be useful in order to find the correct answer in the passage. The results show that the SSP are few more better in the interaction with the users. However, some users said that it is more easy to find the answer knowing the relevant domains than through the SSP.