QUESTION ANSWERING

Computer Engineering electronics Engineering Civil Engineering

In information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), question answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language. To find the answer to a question, a QA computer program may use either a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents (a text corpus such as the World Wide Web or some local collection).QA research attempts to deal with a wide range of question types including: fact, list, definition, How, Why, hypothetical, semantically constrained, and cross-lingual questions. Search collections vary from small local document collections, to internal organization documents, to compiled newswire reports, to the World Wide Web.Closed-domain question answering deals with questions under a specific domain (for example, medicine or automotive maintenance), and can be seen as an easier task because NLP systems can exploit domain-specific knowledge frequently formalized in ontologies. Alternatively, closed-domain might refer to a situation where only a limited type of questions are accepted, such as questions asking for descriptive rather than procedural information.Open-domain question answering deals with questions about nearly anything, and can only rely on general ontologies and world knowledge. On the other hand, these systems usually have much more data available from which to extract the answer.QA is regarded as requiring more complex natural language processing (NLP) techniques than other types of information retrieval such as document retrieval, thus natural language search engines are sometimes regarded as the next step beyond current search engines loading..