Going beyond traditional QA systems: challenges and keys in opinion question answering

The treatment of factual data has been widely studied in different areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, processing subjective information still poses important challenges. This paper presents research aimed at assessing techniques that have been suggested as appropriate in the context of subjective - Opinion Question Answering (OQA). We evaluate the performance of an OQA with these new components and propose methods to optimally tackle the issues encountered. We assess the impact of including additional resources and processes with the purpose of improving the system performance on two distinct blog datasets. The improvements obtained for the different combination of tools are statistically significant. We thus conclude that the proposed approach is adequate for the OQA task, offering a good strategy to deal with opinionated questions.

This paper has been partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - Spanish Government (grant no. TIN2009-13391-C04-01), and Conselleria d'Educación - Generalitat Valenciana (grant no. PROMETEO/2009/119 and ACOMP/2010/286).