Some Foundational Linguistic Elements for QA Systems: an Application to E-government Services

Time saving and time flexibility of eGovernment procedures is more attractive than face-to-face services to citizens. Citizens may interact with government via emails, search administrative information via eGovernment portals, or even via large-public search engines. Procedural question-answering systems are of much interest to query legislation, court decisions, guidelines, procedures, etc. In this paper, we present a typology of how-questions asked on the web. Then, we explore facets of procedural texts : their typology and general prototypical structures. We finally present our strategy for answering procedural questions using the notion of questionability of a procedural text.