QA on the Web: a preliminary study for Spanish language

Finding accurate information on the Web has become a challenge due to the increment in the number of documents available online. Current search engines retrieve relevant documents to general - often short - user queries, but fail extracting answers to simple factual questions in natural language. This work presents the basis of a statistical question answering system capable to find answers to factual questions in Spanish language from the Web. This approach is supported on data redundancy rather than on sophisticated linguistic analyses of either questions and candidate answers. Preliminary results show that it is feasible to find concise and accurate answers from the Web to factual questions made in Spanish language. The study also concludes that the available Spanish documents in the Web are redundant enough in order to apply statistical methods like those described in this document in order to provide better mechanisms for information access.