摘要：Given the limitations of available platforms for creating conversational agents, and that a question-answering agent suffices in many scenarios, we take advantage of the Information Retrieval library Lucene for developing such an agent for Portuguese. The solution described answers natural language questions based on an indexed list of FAQs. Its adaptation to different domains is a matter of changing the underlying list. Different configurations of this solution, mostly on the language analysis level, resulted in different search strategies, which were tested for answering questions about the economic activity in Portugal. In addition to comparing the different search strategies, we concluded that, towards better answers, it is fruitful to combine the results of different strategies with a voting method.
关键词：information retrieval; question answering; natural language interface; natural language processing; natural language understanding
