BRUJA: Question Classification For Spanish. Using Machine Translationand An English Classifier

Question Classification is an important task in Question Answering Systems. This paper presents a Spanish Question Classifier based on machine learning, automatic online translators and different language features. Our system works with English collections and bilingual questions (English/Spanish). We have tested two Spanish-English online translators to identify the lost of precision. We have made experiments using lexical, syntactic and semantic features to test which ones made a better performance. The obtained results show that our system makes good classifications, over a 80% in terms of accuracy using the original English questions and over a 65% using Spanish questions and machine translation systems. Our conclusion about the features is that a lexical, syntactic and semantic features combination obtains the best result.