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Using Lucene for Developing a Question-Answering Agent in Portuguese

Authors Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira , Ricardo Filipe, Ricardo Rodrigues , Ana Alves

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Author Details

Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira
  • CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Ricardo Filipe
  • ISEC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal
Ricardo Rodrigues
  • CISUC, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • ESEC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal
Ana Alves
  • CISUC, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • ISEC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal

Funding

This work was partially funded by FCT’s INCoDe 2030 initiative, in the scope of the demonstration project AIA, "Apoio Inteligente a Empreendedores (chatbots)".

Cite As Get BibTex

Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira, Ricardo Filipe, Ricardo Rodrigues, and Ana Alves. Using Lucene for Developing a Question-Answering Agent in Portuguese. In 8th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2019). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 74, pp. 2:1-2:14, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2019.2

Abstract

Given the limitations of available platforms for creating conversational agents, and that a question-answering agent suffices in many scenarios, we take advantage of the Information Retrieval library Lucene for developing such an agent for Portuguese. The solution described answers natural language questions based on an indexed list of FAQs. Its adaptation to different domains is a matter of changing the underlying list. Different configurations of this solution, mostly on the language analysis level, resulted in different search strategies, which were tested for answering questions about the economic activity in Portugal. In addition to comparing the different search strategies, we concluded that, towards better answers, it is fruitful to combine the results of different strategies with a voting method.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Search interfaces
  • Information systems → Question answering
  • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing
Keywords
  • information retrieval
  • question answering
  • natural language interface
  • natural language processing
  • natural language understanding

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References

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