Title: Versatile question answering systems: seeing in synthesis

Authors: Sparsh Mittal, Ankush Mittal

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA-50011, USA. ' Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering Roorkee, Uttarakhand, 247667, India

Abstract: Recent advances in massive information storage and growth of internet have led to increased necessity of tools such as search engines and QA systems to get meaningful answers from the vast amount of information. The complex questions appearing in real-life generally require multiple techniques or sub-division of question at various levels. Several practical systems have been developed to explore this. This paper reviews state-of-art QA systems which provide enhanced and versatile functionality at various levels in their architecture and then makes the following contributions: 1) it provides useful overview of research trends and recent developments in the area of QA; 2) the paper introduces and defines basic design parameters for any QA system; 3) it resolves semantic heterogeneity by clarifying the meaning and context in which different terms are used by different researchers; 4) it classifies the existing QA systems in broad groups, based on the point at which versatility (multiplicity) is introduced/handled in the system; 5) by developing a unified view of existing frontiers of QA systems, it provides clear directions for future research and development in the area.

Keywords: question answering systems; QAS; versatile QA systems; survey; QA design parameters; information retrieval.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2011.038968

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2011 Vol.5 No.2, pp.119 - 142

Published online: 21 Oct 2014 *

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