Antonio Ferrández

University of Alicante | UA · Department of Software and Computing Systems

The scientific and technological evolution that has taken place in the field of human activity recognition, while enormous, is possibly only the tip of the iceberg of the possibilities that we are currently facing and will continue to experience in the foreseeable future. Much of this innovation has also been driven by the rise of IoT technology at...

Different fields such as linguistics, teaching, and computing have demonstrated special interest in the study of sign languages (SL). However, the processes of teaching and learning these languages turn complex since it is unusual to find people teaching these languages that are fluent in both SL and the native language of the students. The teachin...

The study of sign languages (SL) has generated great interest in the fields of linguistics, computing and teaching. Teaching and learning SL are complex tasks, since they are rarely taught by people who are fluent both in SL and the native language of the students. These lessons taught by deaf people are irreplaceable, but it is appropriate for the...

The study of phonological proximity makes it possible to establish a basis for future decision-making in the treatment of sign languages. Knowing how close a set of signs are allows the interested party to decide more easily its study by clustering, as well as the teaching of the language to third parties based on similarities. In addition, it lays...

User-generated content about brands is an important source of big data that can be transformed into valuable information. A huge number of items are reviewed and rated by consumers on a daily basis, and managers have a keen interest in real-time monitoring of this information to improve decision-making. The main challenge is to mine reliable textua...

Automatic word sense disambiguation (WSD) from text is a task of great importance in various applications of natural language processing, for example, in machine translation, question answering, automatic summarization or sentiment analysis. There are different approaches to finding the meaning of a word within a context, whether using supervised,...

Nowadays, firms have realized the importance of Big Data, highlighting the need for understanding the current state of marketing practice with respect to Big Data analytics. Among the different sources of Big Data, User-Generated Content (UGC) is one of the most important ones. From blogs to social media and online reviews, consumers generate huge...

Sign languages (SL) are the first language for most deaf people. Consequently, bidirectional communication among deaf and non-deaf people has always been a challenging issue. Sign language usage has increased due to inclusion policies and general public agreement, which must then become evident in information technologies, in the many facets that c...

Companies have realized the importance of “big data” in creating a sustainable competitive advantage, and user-generated content (UGC) represents one of big data’s most important sources. From blogs to social media and online reviews, consumers generate a huge amount of brand-related information that has a decisive potential business value for mark...

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New information and communication technologies have contributed to the development of the smart city concept. On a physical level, this paradigm is characterised by deploying a substantial number of different devices that can sense their surroundings and generate a large amount of data. The most typical case is image and video acquisition sensors....

The accessing and processing of textual information (i.e. the storing and querying of a set of strings) is especially important for many current applications (e.g. information retrieval and social networks), especially when working in the fields of Big Data or IoT, which require the handling of very large string dictionaries. Typical data structure...

E-Learning is a response to the new educational needs of society and an important development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) because it represents the future of the teaching and learning processes. However, this trend presents many challenges, such as the processing of online forums which generate a huge number of messages with...

E-Learning is a response to the new educational needs of society and an important development in Information and Communication Technologies. However, this trend presents many challenges, such as the lack of an architecture that allows a unified management of heterogeneous string dictionaries required by all the users of e-learning environments, whi...

Current trends in medicine regarding issues of accessibility to, and quantity and quality of information and QoS (Quality of Service) are very different compared to former decades. The current state requires new methods for addressing the challenge of dealing with enormous amounts of data present, and growing, on the Web and other heterogeneous dat...

p class="33">Massive Open Online Courses and e-learning represent the future of the teaching-learning processes through the development of Information and Communication Technologies. They are the response to the new education needs of society. However, this future also presents many challenges such as the processing of online forums when a huge num...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for devices around the world to acquire information and store it, in order to be able to use it at a later stage. However, this potential opportunity is often not exploited because of the excessively big interval between the data collection and the capability to process and analyse it. In this paper...

Irresponsible and negligent use of natural resources in the last five decades has made it an important priority to adopt more intelligent ways of managing existing resources, especially the ones related to energy. The main objective of this paper is to explore the opportunities of integrating internal data already stored in Data Warehouses together...

Decision support systems (DSS) support business or organizational decision-making activities, which require the access to information that is internally stored in databases or data warehouses, and externally in the Web accessed by Information Retrieval (IR) or Question Answering (QA) systems. Graphical interfaces to query these sources of informati...

Business Intelligence (BI) applications allow their users to query, understand, and analyze existing data within their organizations in order to acquire useful knowledge, thus making better strategic decisions. The core of BI applications is a Data Warehouse (DW), which integrates several heterogeneous structured data sources in a common repository...

During the past decades the resources have been used of an irresponsible and negligent manner. This has led to an increasing necessity of adopting more intelligent ways to manage the existing resources, specially the ones related to energy. In this regard, one of the main aims of this paper is to explore the opportunities of using ICT (Information...

Currently there are an overwhelming number of scientific publications in Life Sciences, especially in Genetics and Biotechnology. This huge amount of information is structured in corporate Data Warehouses (DW) or in Biological Databases (e.g. UniProt, RCSB Protein Data Bank, CEREALAB or GenBank), whose main drawback is its cost of updating that mak...

Natural Language Interfaces to Query Databases (NLIDBs) have been an active research field since the 1960s. However, they have not been widely adopted. This article explores some of the biggest challenges and approaches for building NLIDBs and proposes techniques to reduce implementation and adoption costs. The article describes {AskMe*}, a new sys...

The main objective of this project is based on the need to reconsider the clasical HLT philosophy to adapt it, not only to the currently available resources (unstructured data with multimodality, multilinguality and different levels of formality) but also to the real needs of the final users. In order to reach this objective it is necessary to incl...

El objetivo de este proyecto se basa en la necesidad de replantearse la filosofía clásica del TLH para adecuarse tanto a las fuentes disponibles actualmente (datos no estructurados con multi-modalidad, multi-lingualidad y diferentes grados de formalidad) como a las necesidades reales de los usuarios finales. Para conseguir este objetivo es necesari...

Question answering (QA) applications can be considered as the potential successors to the traditional information retrieval on the Web. However, QA systems should be adapted to restricted domains for the sake of precision. This adaptation is not a trivial task, since several heterogeneous resources related to a restricted domain must be integrated...

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) requires Question Answering (QA) systems for providing intuitive interfaces to state natural language questions and obtaining precise answers related to some specific topic. Therefore, adapting QA systems to new restricted domains is an increasingly necessity for these systems to be applied in AmI environments. Unfortunat...

Traditional Information Retrieval (IR) models assume that the index terms of queries and documents are statistically independent of each other, which is intuitively wrong. This paper proposes the incorporation of the lexical and syntactic knowledge generated by a POS-tagger and a syntactic Chunker into traditional IR similarity measures for includi...

A Question Answering (QA) system must provide concise answers from large collections of documents to questions stated by the user in natural language. However, although many QA systems for open domain exist, its adaptation for restricted domains (such as those of healthcare, agri culture, transportation, or science) is a far from trivial task. The...

Business Intelligence (BI) applications no longer limit their analysis to structured databases, but they also need to obtain actionable information from unstructured sources (e.g. data from the Web, etc.). Interestingly, Question Answering (QA) systems are good candidates for these purposes, since they allow users to obtain concise answers to quest...

This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-refer...

A Question Answering (QA) system must provide concise answers from large collections of documents to questions stated by the user in natural language. Importantly, a question should be correctly classified by means of a predefined taxonomy in order to determine which is the Expected Answer Type (EAT), thus reducing the searching space over document...

Corpus of Information Retrieval (IR) systems are formed by text documents that often come from rather heterogeneous sources, such as Web sites or OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems. Faithfully converting these sources into flat text files is not a trivial task, since noise can be easily introduced due to spelling or typeset errors. Importa...

Business Intelligence (BI) applications allow their users to query, understand, and analyze existing data within their organizations in order to acquire useful knowledge, thus making better decisions. The core of BI applications is a data warehouse (DW) which integrates several heterogeneous data sources, mainly structured transactional databases....

A Question Answering (QA) system must provide concise answers, from a set of text documents, to questions stated by the user in natural language. Current QA systems are oriented to answer open-domain questions, but question analysis must be adapted to the characteristics of a restricted domain for being successfully applied to real-world scenarios....

Information Retrieval systems normally have to work with rather heterogeneous sources, such as Web sites or documents from Optical Character Recognition tools. The correct conversion of these sources into flat text files is not a trivial task since noise can easily be introduced as a result of spelling or typeset errors. Interestingly, this is not...

Numerous resources have been developed to have a better access to scientific information in the agricultural domain. However, they are rather concerned with providing general metadata of bibliographic references, which prevents users from accessing precise agricultural information in a transparent and simple manner. To overcome this drawback, in th...

This paper describes a new advance in solving Cross-Lingual Question Answering (CL–QA) tasks. It is built on three main pillars: (i) the use of several multilingual knowledge resources to reference words between languages (the Inter Lingual Index (ILI) module of EuroWordNet and the multilingual knowledge encoded in Wikipedia); (ii) the consideratio...

Common approaches to evaluate Question Answering (QA) systems consider exclusively the accuracy of the answers. It ignores an essential feature of all the computational proce- dures: the eciency. In this note, we explore new evaluation measures that take into account, in addition to the accuracy, the eciency, which is incorporated through the magni...

This paper deals with the AliQAn QA system in the multilingual (English - Spanish) task. It highlights the translation module of the QA system by applying two methods: the first one based on logic forms, and the other on machine translation techniques. Moreover, the system is able to solve the anaphora resolution problem by applying linguistic tech...

This paper describes the participation of the system AliQAn in the CLEF 2008 Spanish monolingual QA task. This time, the main goals of the current version of AliQAn were to deal with topic-related questions and to decrease the number of inexact answers. We have also explored the use of the Wikipedia corpora, which have posed some new challenges for...

This paper describes the participation of the system AliQAn, a monolingual opendomain Question Answering (QA) System developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information System at the University of Alicante, in the CLEF-2008 Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task. Here, we focus on explaining a couple of strong points of the current v...

In QA@CLEF 2008, we participate in monolingual (Spanish) and multilingual (English - Spanish) tasks. Specifically, in this paper, we will tackle with the English - Spanish QA task. In this edition we will deal with two main problems: an heterogeneous document collection (news articles and Wikipedia) and a large number of topic-related questions, wh...

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused on the evaluation of the precision. In this paper, we developed a mathematic procedure in order to ex- plore new evaluation measures in QA systems considering the answer time. Also, we carried out an exercise for the evaluation of QA systems within a time co...

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused in the evaluation of the precision. Nevertheless, the importance of the answer time never has been evaluated. This paper studies the problem of the evaluation in QA systems, focusing on the way in which the time can be considered. Specifically, we carried ou...

This work describes an inference mechanism applied to AliQAn Question Answering System for Spanish in open domain. AliQAn is based fundamentally on the use of syntactic patterns to identify the possible answers. An inference mechanism is applied to the questions set of economic type. In this way, our system improves the accuracy of this question ty...

In this paper, a novel model for monolingual Information Retrieval in English and Spanish language is proposed. This model uses Natural Language Processing techniques (a POS-tagger, a Partial Parser, and an Anaphora Resolver) in order to improve the precision of traditional IR systems, by means of indexing the “entities” and the “relations” between...

This paper presents a study of the negative effect of Machine Translation (MT) on the precision of Cross–Lingual Question Answering (CL–QA). For this research, a English–Spanish Question Answering (QA) system is used. Also, the sets of 200 official questions from CLEF 2004 and 2006 are used. The CL experimental evaluation using MT reveals that the...

The application of the multilingual knowledge encoded in Wikipedia to an open–domain Cross–Lingual Question Answering system based on the Inter Lingual Index (ILI) module of EuroWordNet is proposed and evaluated. This strategy overcomes the problems due to ILI’s low coverage on proper nouns (Named Entities). Moreover, as these are open class words...

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused in the evaluation of the precision. Nevertheless, the importance of the answer time never has been evaluated. In this paper, we developed a mathematic procedure in order to explore new evaluation measures in QA systems considering the answer time. Also, we c...

Este artículo presenta nuestro sistema de Búsqueda de Respuestas (BR) bilingüe, llamado BRILI. BRILI ha participado en la tarea de BR Inglés-Castellano de la edición del 2006 del "Cross-Language Evaluation Forum" (CLEF) quedando en primera posición. BRILI está basado en el uso del módulo ILI ("Inter Lingual Index") de EuroWordNet. Además, se muestr...

In this paper we present BRUPIA, a Question Answering (QA) system in a restricted domain: the web academic environment at the University of Alicante. This system is the transformation of an open domain QA system, AliQAn. This paper focuses on explaining how an open domain system can be transformed into another one that can successfully work on a we...

Question Answering is a major research topic at the University of Alicante. For this reason, this year two groups participated in the QA@CLEF track using different approaches. In this paper we describe the work of Alicante 2 group. This paper describes AliQAn, a monolingual open-domain Question Answering (QA) System developed in the Department of L...

A previous version of AliQAn participated in the CLEF 2005 Spanish Monolingual Question Answering task. For this year’s run, to the system are added new and representative patterns in question analysis and extraction of the answer. A new ontology of question types has been included. The inexact questions have been improved. The information retrieva...

This paper studies the problem of filtering data in Passage Retrieval applied to Question Answering. Specifically, in this paper we have proved that the Mean-Value Theorem can play an important role to improve Question Answering. We have studied the way in which this theorem can be applied in order to produce a maximum data reduction without precis...

The main aim of this work is to study the application of automatic anaphora or co-reference resolution techniques to Question Answering (QA) systems. Moreover, this chapter includes an overview of anaphora problem, a summary of approaches to anaphora resolution in Natural Language Processing and an analysis of their effectiveness and applicability...

This paper describes the BRILI Cross-lingual Question Answering (CL-QA) system. The BRILI system is capable to answer English questions from Spanish documents. It has partici-pated in the 2006 edition of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). Some new characteris-tics in BRILI are described, especially the strategy used for the question proces...

An initial version of AliQAn participated in the CLEF-2005 Spanish Monolingual Ques- tion Answering task. AliQAn has been improved and it has better results than last year. The system ofiers new and representative patterns in question analysis and extraction of the answer. A new ontology of questions types has been included. The inexact questions h...

This paper studies the influence of a Word Sense Disambiguation algorithm for nouns on AliQAn, the Question Answering with which we have participated in the CLEF-2005. Applying the traditional WSD decreases the performance in 4.7% on the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). To solve this problem, we propose two different uses of WSD: (1) to choose a set of...

We propose a model for monolingual Information Retrieval in English and Spanish languages. This model uses Natural Language Processing techniques and resources (a POS-tagger. a Partial Parser, an Anaphora Resolver. and WordNet) in order to improve the precision of traditional IR systems. indexing the entities and the relations between these entitie...

Open-Domain Question Answering systems (QA) performs the task of detecting text fragments in a collection of documents that contain the response to user's queries.

In this paper, a novel model of indexation in IR is proposed, in order to overcome the problems of traditional bag of words approaches, by means of indexing the "entities" and the "relations" between these entities in the documents through the clauses and anaphoric relations. This model has been evaluated on the Los Angeles Times collection. The ob...

Proyecto financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología en su programa de Fomento de la Investigación Técnica (PROFIT) con código FIT-150500-2002-416.

One of the main problems of many commercial Machine Translation (MT) and experimental systems is that they do not carry out a correct pronominal anaphora generation.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the e#ects of applying pronominal anaphora resolution to Question Answering #QA# systems.

We present the results obtained at iCLEF-2002. This is the first time that we have participated in the iCLEF task, and we have used our Passage Retrieval approach (IR-n). This system previously divides the document in fragments or passages, and the similaxity of each passage with the query is then measured. Finally, the document that contains the m...

Passage Retrieval is an alternative to traditional document-oriented Information Retrieval. These systems use contiguous text fragments (or passages) instead of full documents as the basic unit of information. The IR-n system is a passage retrieval system that uses groups of contiguous sentences as units of information. This paper reports on exper...

In this paper we deal with several kinds of anaphora in unrestricted texts. These kinds of anaphora are pronominal references, surfacecount anaphora and one-anaphora. In order to solve these anaphors we work on the output of a part-of-speech tagger, on which we automatically apply a partial parsing from the formalism: Slot Unification Grammar, whic...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user's query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as pas...

In this paper the pronominal anaphora generation module of a complete interlingua Machine Translation (MT)approach is presented. The approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation ) allows the generation of anaphoric expressions into the target language from the interlingua representation of the source text. AGIR uses d...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user’s query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). This paper discusses the use of our PR system in the question answering process (QA). Our main objective is t...

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the user’s query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as pas...

This paper presents the pronominal anaphora generation module in a Machine Translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach -AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) - allows the generation of anaphoric expressions into the target language from the interlingua representation of the source text. AGIR uses different kinds of...

This paper describes the architecture, operation and results obtained with the Question Answeringprototype developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at theUniversity of Alicante. This system is based on our TREC-10 approach where differentimprovements have been introduced. Main modifications reside on the introducti...