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Esfinge is a general domain Portuguese question answering system. The goal of a question answering system is to answer precisely questions formulated in natural language. This is different from the more widely known search engines such as Google which retrieve documents based on a set of keywords chosen by their users. Esfinge is a general domain system because it is not specially tuned or prepared to answer questions in a particular domain or subject.
One important resource used by Esfinge to find its answers is information redundancy: this means that it is more likely that Esfinge can answer correctly questions which are answered in a larger number of documents.
The starting point for its development was the architecture described in [Brill, 2003], exploring the redundancy existent in the Web where Portuguese is one of the most used languages [Aires & Santos 2002].
Esfinge participated in the QA track at CLEF from 2004 to 2008. For a more detailed description of Esfinge, as well of its participation at CLEF, please check the publications about Esfinge.
The development of Esfinge ended in 2008, but the source code used in some of the system's modules can be obtained here in the terms of the GNU General Public License.