The iCLEF 2004 experiment at the University of Alicante has focused on how to assist users when searching the correct answer in passages written in a language different from the one of the query. The language of the users is Spanish and the language of the documents/passages English. In-order to help users, a first system shows, together with the passage in English, the relevant domains of the passage and the relevant domains of the query. These relevant domains were extracted automatically from WordNet Domains. A second system shows, together with the passage in English, the syntactic-semantic patterns (SSP) of each passage and the SSP of the query. The SSP are formed by the verb and the main nouns of a sentence (that is, the head nouns of the main complements). For users with low English skills, our hypothesis is that knowing the relevant domain and/or the SSP will be useful to find the correct answer in the passage. The results show that the SSP are a little bit better in the interaction with the users. However, some users say that it is easier to find the answer knowing the relevant domains than through the SSP.
展开▼
