José Luis Vicedo González

University of Alicante | UA · Department of Software and Computing Systems

Wikipedia has become one of the most important sources of information available all over the world. However, the categorization of Wikipedia articles is not standardized and the searches are mainly performed on keywords rather than concepts. In this paper we present an application that builds a hierarchical structure to organize all Wikipedia entri...

This paper presents an application for medicinal plants prescription based on text classification techniques. The system receives as an input a free text describing the symptoms of a user, and retrieves a ranked list of medicinal plants related to those symptoms. In addition, a set of links to Wikipedia are also provided, enriching the information...

This article presents a minimally supervised approach to question classification on fine-grained taxonomies. We have defined an algorithm that automatically obtains lists of weighted terms for each class in the taxonomy, thus identifying which terms are highly related to the classes and are highly discriminative between them. These lists have then...

This paper presents the QALL-ME Framework, a reusable architecture for building multi- and cross-lingual Question Answering (QA) systems working on structured data modelled by an ontology. It is released as free open source software with a set of demo components and extensive documentation, which makes it easy to use and adapt. The main characteris...

Este artículo presenta una aproximacíon a la clasificación automática de preguntas en español y catalán. El sistema de clasificación está basado en el algoritmo SVM y en el uso de diferentes funciones kernel, empleando únicamente características textuales superficiales que permiten la obtencíon de un sistema fácilmente adaptable a diferentes idiomas....

This paper presents a multilayered architecture that enhances the capabilities of current QA systems and allows different types of complex questions or queries to be processed. The answers to these questions need to be gathered from factual information scattered throughout different documents. Specifically, we designed a specialized layer to proces...

This paper presents our research related to automatic expected answer type and named entity annotation tasks in a question answering context. We present the initial step of our research, in which we created the annotation guidelines. We therefore show and justify the tag set employed in the annotation of a collection of questions, and finally, diff...

The analysis and creation of annotated corpus is fundamental for implementing natural language processing solutions based on machine learning. In this paper we present a parallel corpus of 4500 questions in Spanish and English on the touristic domain, obtained from real users. With the aim of training a question answering system, the questions were...

This paper presents QACID an ontology-based Question Answering system applied to the CInema Domain. This system allows users to retrieve information from formal ontologies by using as input queries formulated in natural language. The original characteristic of QACID is the strategy used to fill the gap between users’ expressiveness and formal knowl...

Many algorithms have come up in the last years to tackle automated text categorization. They have been exhaustively studied, leading to several variants and combinations not only in the particular procedures but also in the treatment of the input data. A widely used approach is representing documents as Bag-Of-Words (BOW) and weighting tokens with...

This paper presents the QALL-ME benchmark, a multilingual resource of annotated spoken requests in the tourism domain, freely available for research purposes. The languages currently involved in the project are Italian, English, Spanish and German. It introduces a semantic annotation scheme for spoken information access requests, specifically deriv...

This paper presents a real-world applica- tion for assisting medical diagnosis and drug prescription, which relies on the exclusive use of machine learning tech- niques. We have automatically processed an extensive biomedical literature to train a categorization algorithm in order to pro- vide it with the capability of matching symptoms to MeSH des...

This paper presents a real-world application for assisting medical diagnosis which relies on the exclusive use of machine learning techniques. We have automatically processed an extensive biomedical literature to train a categorization algorithm in order to provide it with the capability of matching symptoms to MeSH diseases descriptors, To interac...

Many algorithms have come up in the last years to tackle automated text categorization. They have been exhaustively studied, leading to several variants and combinations not only in the particular procedures but also in the treatment of the input data. A widely used approach is representing documents as Bag-Of-Words (BOW) and weighting tokens with...

As in the previous QA@CLEF competition, two separate groups at the University of Alicante participated this year using different approaches. This paper describes the work of Alicante 1 group. We have continued with the research line established in the past competition, where the main goal was to obtain a fully data-driven system based on machine le...

In this paper we present a novel multiple-taxonomy question classification system, facing the challenge of assigning categories in multiple taxonomies to natural language questions. We applied our system to category search on faceted information. The system provides a natural language interface to faceted information, detecting the categories reque...

The authors review a book that offers a human-centered approach on next-generation multimedia database retrieval.

The Internet is increasingly being recognized for its potential for health communication and education. The perceived relative advantage of the Internet over other media is its cost-effectiveness and interactivity, which in turn contribute to its persuasive ...

Automated question answering has been a topic of research and development since the earliest AI applications. Computing power has increased since the first such systems were developed, and the general methodology has changed from the use of hand-encoded knowledge bases about simple domains to the use of text collections as the main knowledge source...

This paper describes the development of an English corpus of factoid TREC-like question-answer pairs. The corpus obtained consists of more than 70,000 samples, containing each one the following information: a question, its question type, an exact answer to the question, the different contexts levels (sentence, paragraph and document) where the answ...

Definición de los Sistema de Búsqueda de Respuestas. Módulos del sistema. Principales competiciones.

This paper presents an automatic feature extraction method for category ranking. It has been evaluated using Reuters and OHSUMED data sets, outperforming some of the best known and most widely used approaches.

Question classification is one of the first tasks carried out in a Question Answering system. In this paper we present a multilingual question classification system based on machine learning techniques. We use Support Vector Machines to classify the questions. All the features needed to train and test this method are automatically extracted through...

Category ranking provides a way to classify plain text documents into a pre-determined set of categories. This work proposes to have a look at typical document collections and analyze which measures and peculiarities can help us to represent documents so that the resulting features are as much discriminative and representative as possible. Consider...

The main aim of this work is to study the application of automatic anaphora or co-reference resolution techniques to Question Answering (QA) systems. Moreover, this chapter includes an overview of anaphora problem, a summary of approaches to anaphora resolution in Natural Language Processing and an analysis of their effectiveness and applicability...

As in the previous QA@CLEF track, two separate groups at the University of Ali-cante participated this year using different approaches. This paper describes the work of Alicante 1 group. We have continued with the research line established in the past competition, where the main goal was to obtain a fully data-driven system based on machine learnin...

Question Classification (QC) is usually the first stage in a Question Answering system. This paper presents a multilingual SVM-based question classification system aiming to be language and domain independent. For this purpose, we use only surface text features. The system has been tested on the TREC QA track questions set obtaining encouraging res...

As Question Answering is a major research topic at the University of Alicante, this year two separate groups participated in the QA@CLEF track using different approaches. This paper describes the work of Alicante 1 group. Thinking of future developments, we have designed a modular framework based on XML that will easily let us integrate, combine an...

This paper describes the development of an image retrieval system that combines probabilistic and ontological information 1 . The process is divided in two different stages: indexing and retrieval. Three information flows have been created with different kind of information each one: word forms, stems and stemmed bigrams. The final result com-bines...

This paper describes the participation of the University of Alicante (UA) in CLEF 2005 image retrieval task. For this purpose we used an image retrieval system based on probabilistic information combined with ontological information and a feedback technique. Several information streams are created using different sources: stems, words and bigrams;...

This paper presents the evaluation of a QA system for the treatment of complex temporal questions. The system was implemented in a multilayered architecture where complex temporal questions are first decomposed into simple questions, according to the temporal relations expressed in the original question. These simple questions are then processed in...

This paper presents a multilingual approach to Question Classification based on machine learning, using language independent features. This way we obtain a system flexible and easily adaptable to new languages. Using a parallel corpus in English and Spanish, we test the performance of the system with three different techniques: Support Vector Machi...

This paper describes the novelties introduced in the Question Answering system de-veloped in the Natural Language Processing and Information Systems Group at the University of Alicante for QA@CLEF 2005 campaign with respect to our previous par-ticipations. Thinking of future developments, this year we have designed a modular framework based on XML...

Este artículo presenta una aproximación multilingüe a la clasificación de preguntas basada en aprendizaje automático, empleando características de aprendizaje independientes del idioma. Esto va a permitir que el sistema sea flexible y fácilmente adaptable a nuevos idiomas. Sobre un corpus paralelo de preguntas en inglés y castellano, contrastaremos...

This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answering prototype for Spanish developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at the University of Alicante for the CLEF-2004 Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task. Our system is based on the prototype developed for the CLEF-2003 Sp...

This paper presents the approach used by the University of Alicante in the ImageCLEF 2004 adhoc retrieval task. This task is performed through multilingual search requests (topics) against an historic photographic collection in which images are accompanied with English captions. This approach uses these captions to perform retrieval and is based on...

This paper presents a multi-layered Question Answering (Q.A.) architecture suitable for enhancing current Q.A. capabilities with the possibility of processing complex questions. That is, questions whose answer needs to be gathered from pieces of factual information scattered in different documents. Specifically, we have designed a layer oriented to...

This paper compares two approaches to a multilayered Question Answering (QA) architecture suitable for enhancing current QA capabilities with the possibility of processing complex questions. That is, questions whose answer needs to be gathered from pieces of factual information that is scattered in different documents. Specifically, we have designe...

Este artículo presenta una arquitectura multicapa de Búsqueda de Respuestas (BR) que permite mejorar los resultados de los sistemas actuales de BR ofreciendo la posibilidad de procesar preguntas complejas. Esto es, aquellas preguntas cuya respuesta se forma a partir de partes de información obtenidas de diferentes documentos. Concretamente, hemos d...

La creciente demanda de sistemas que respondan de forma precisa y escueta a las necesidades de información de los usuarios ha potenciado la aparición de un nuevo campo de investigación: la Búsqueda de Respuestas (BR). El objetivo de la investigación en este campo va mucho más allá de la simple localización de documentos relevantes realizadas por lo...

This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answering prototype for Spanish developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at the University of Alicante for the CLEF 2003 Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task. Our system has been fully developed from scratch and it combines sh...

La creciente demanda de sistemas que respondan de forma precisa y escueta a las necesidades de informacion de los usuarios ha potenciado la aparicion de un nuevo campo de investigacion:la Busqueda de Respuestas (BR). El objetivo de la investigacion en este campo va mucho mas alla de la simple localizacion de documentos relevantes realizadas por los...

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the e#ects of applying pronominal anaphora resolution to Question Answering #QA# systems.

We present the results obtained at iCLEF-2002. This is the first time that we have participated in the iCLEF task, and we have used our Passage Retrieval approach (IR-n). This system previously divides the document in fragments or passages, and the similaxity of each passage with the query is then measured. Finally, the document that contains the m...

Passage Retrieval is an alternative to traditional document-oriented Information Retrieval. These systems use contiguous text fragments (or passages) instead of full documents as the basic unit of information. The IR-n system is a passage retrieval system that uses groups of contiguous sentences as units of information. This paper reports on exper...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user's query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as pas...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user’s query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). This paper discusses the use of our PR system in the question answering process (QA). Our main objective is t...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user’s query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as pas...

This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answeringprototype developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at theUniversity of Alicante. This system is based on our TREC-10 approach where differentimprovements have been introduced. Main modifications reside on the introducti...

Los sistemas de Búsqueda de Respuestas (BR) tienen como objetivo detectar pequeños fragmentos de texto de una colección que respondan una consulta concreta de un usuario. La complejidad de estos sistemas, dificulta que sean aplicado eficientemente a colecciones de gran tamaño. Por ello los sistemas de BR utilizan previamente sistemas de recuperació...

Trabajos previos demuestran que la utilización de fragmentos de documentos como unidad básica de información, para calcular la relevancia de un documento con respecto a una pregunta, mejora sensiblemente los resultados de los sistemas de recuperación de información. Sin embargo, no se ha llegado a un consenso acerca de cómo definir esos fragmentos...

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Previous work demonstrates that information retrieval system performance is sensibly improved when using document passages as the basic unit of information. However, the IR community has not yet arrived at consensus about the best way of defining text passages for retrieval purposes. This paper reports on experiments with the IR-n system, an inform...

El sistema presentado en este trabajo realiza la tarea de Búsqueda de Respuestas sobre dominios no restringidos (open domain Question Answering - QA) desde una perspectiva semántica. Para ello, se define un modelo semántico de representación de los conceptos referidos en las preguntas y una medida de relevancia que permite la localización y selecci...

Information Retrieval (IR) and Question Answering (QA) systems currently ignore information referred anaphorically in documents. Nevertheless, these references hide important information whose analysis can contribute to improve both IR and QA systems performance. The main aim of this paper is to analyze benefits of solving pronominal anaphora for I...

This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answering prototype developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at the University of Alicante. Our approach accomplishes question representation by combining keywords with a semantic representation of expected answer characteristic...

In this paper, the obtained results on iCLEF-2002 are presented. This is the first time that we try to face up the iCLEF task, and we have used a Passage Retrieval approach, specifically our previously developed system called IR-n. This system previously divides the document in fragments or passages, and after that, the similarity of each passage w...

En esta ponencia se presentarán las características básicas de un sistema de Pregunta-Respuesta entendido como una de las principales aportaciones desde las tecnologías lingüísticas hacia la búsqueda y recuperación de la información, y muy especialmente se centrará en describir la aportación que la semántica puede proporcionar a este tipo de sistem...

Resumen Este trabajo presenta la instrumentación y evaluación de un nuevo sistema de tutoriza-ción no presencial en línea. Este proceso tu-torial consiste en el establecimiento de foros telemáticos de debate y discusión en tiempo real orientados al tratamiento de un tema re-lacionado con la asignatura previamente pro-gramado. En este trabajo se pre...

Esta tesis presenta la definición de un modelo de representación de la información textual que aglutina sus características léxicas, sintácticas y semánticas en una unidad de información. Dicha unidad se emplea en tareas de búsqueda de respuestas superando así las limitaciones de los modelos basados en la co-ocurrencia de términos. This thesis defi...

La finalidad de este artículo consiste en analizar los efectos de aplicar técnicas de resolución de la anáfora pronominal en Sistemas de Búsqueda de Respuestas sobre dominios no restringidos (open domain Question Answering Systems - QA). Para ello, se ha implementado un sistema completo de QA y se analiza cómo varía su comportamiento al resolver la...

This paper describes the development of an English corpus of factoid TREC-like question-answer pairs. The corpus obtained consists of a set of more than 70,000 samples, containing each one the following information: a question, its question type, an exact answer to that question, the different context levels (sentence, paragraph and document) where...

In this paper, the QALL-ME project, related to the Information Systems Technologies, is introduced. The project is 36 months long, it is founded by the European Union and it will carry out by 7 institutions. The main goal is to establish a shared infrastructure for multilingual and multimodal open domain Question Answering for mobile phones. Taking...

Este artículo presenta un sistema de Búsqueda de Respuestas basado en ontologías, implicación textual y requerimientos de usuario. Se propone una metodología para la construcción de una base de conocimiento de usuario que nos permite asociar preguntas en lenguaje natural con una representación formal de datos. El núcleo de nuestra estrategia se bas...