QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEMS (Questionnaire 3)

On the web we could find answers to a huge range of questions. This is possible because of the extraordinary quantity of information which is obtainable online.

Question answering, well known as QA, is the assignment of answering a question which is presented in natural language. The QA computer have to answer to the posed question; for that matter, the QA computer program will use a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents. Both options are possible.

Question answering research makes a shot at dealing with an ample coverage of question types including fact, list, definition, how, why, hypothetical, semantically-constrained, and cross-lingual questions.

We have to distinguish “Closed-domain” question answering and “Open-domain” question answering.

The first one, “Closed-domain” question answering does a deal with questions under a particular field (for instance, medicine), while the second one, the “Open-domain” question answering does a deal with inquiries about almost everything. The “Open domain” question answering can solely trust in general ontologies and also in world knowledge.

On the Web we have the opportunity to find many Question Answering systems; some of the most important and famous are:

• Powerset: http://www.powerset.com/
• Assimov the chat bot: http://asimovsoftware.com/
• AnswerBus: http://www.answerbus.com/index.shtml
• NSIR: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/NSIR/html/nsir.cgi
• START (The first question answering  system): http://start.csail.mit.edu/

 REFERENCES:

.Question Answering. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:59, April 01, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering

.Question Answering. (2008, May 7). In Universia. Retrieved 20:29, June 16, 2009, from http://biblioteca.universia.net/html_bura/ficha/params/id/23711.html

. Powerset. Retrieved 20:07, March 31, 2009, from http://www.powerset.com/

.Asimov the Chatbot. In Chatbots. Retrieved 20:13, March 31, 2009, from http://asimovsoftware.com/

.AnswerBus, Question Answering System. (2001-2008). Retrieved 11:59, April 01, 2009, from http://www.answerbus.com/index.shtml

.NSIR, Question Answering System. (2002). Retrieved 21:04, April 01, 2009, from http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/NSIR/html/nsir.cgi

.START, Natural Language Question Answering System. (1993 December). Retrieved 21:11, April 01, 2009, from http://start.csail.mit.edu/