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<Paper uid="W04-2108">
  <Title>Dictionaries merger for text expansion in question answering</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Our society is currently facing an increasing amount of textual data, that no-one can store up or even read. Many automatic systems are designed to flnd a requested piece of information. All the current systems use dictionaries to identify data in texts or in queries. QA softwares, which are particularly demanding about data from the dictionary, have a similar mode of working: they process an utterance (generally the query) in order to provide the largest number of way to express the same meaning. Then they try to flnd a match between the expanded utterance and a text. For example, (Hull, 1999) expands synonymically the 'signiflcant' vocabulary of the question. QUALC (Ferret et al., 1999) adds stemming expansion prior to using a search engine. The Falcon system (Moldovan et al., 2000) uses some semantic relations from WordNet when it expands the question.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper, I present a way to process dictionaries to make them consistent with the needs of the application. I flrst describe the lexical needs of my QA application. I secondly outline the issue of the use of several incompatible dictionaries. Then I show the way I distribute information from additional dictionaries to a reference one: synonyms, derivative forms and taxonomy. Finally, I present the problems and di-culties I found.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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