towards the definition of requirements for mixed fact and opinion question answering systems
The growth of the Social Web led to the birth of new textual genres such as blogs, forums or reviews. Such data sources are extremely relevant because texts pertaining to these categories approach a wide range of topics and are written by people with different social backgrounds. As a consequence, they represent a rich resource that can be exploited to carry out different types of analyses by a whole diversity of entities (potential customers, companies, public figures, political parties, etc.). For this research we created a collection of factoid and opinion questions in Spanish, with the purpose of comparing the performance of an open domain and an opinion QA system. Furthermore, we carried out two separate evaluations for each one of them and thoroughly analysed the results in order to understand the reasons for the problematic cases, thus being able to infer the features that an effective QA system for opinions should have. Our conclusion is that this task requires the use of specialised resources, whose creation for languages other than English is highly necessary.
question answering non-traditional textual genres opinion annotation sentiment analysis