Exploiting Portuguese Lexical Knowledge Bases for Answering Open Domain Cloze Questions Automatically

We present the task of answering cloze questions automatically and how it can be tackled by exploiting lexical knowledge bases (LKBs). This task was performed in what can be seen as an indirect evaluation of Portuguese LKB. We introduce the LKBs used and the algorithms applied, and then report on the obtained results and draw some conclusions: LKBs are definitely useful resources for this challenging task, and exploiting them, especially with PageRanking-based algorithms, clearly improves the baselines. Moreover, larger LKBs, created automatically and not sense-aware led to the best results, as opposed to handcrafted LKBs structured on synsets.