Un método independiente del idioma para responder preguntas de definición

this paper describes a method for answering definition questions that is exclusively based on the use of lexical patterns, and, therefore, that is language independent. this method applies two main text-mining steps. the first step focuses on the discovery of a set of surface lexical patterns from definition examples downloaded from the web. subsequently, it uses these patterns to extract a set of concept-description pairs from a given target document collection. the second step applies a text-mining algorithm to determine the most adequate answer to each specific question. experimental results were obtained using the datasets from the clef 2005 and 2006 for the monolingual tasks in spanish, french and italian. these results demonstrate the relevance of the method which showed very high precisions for the three languages.