Question Answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language.
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.
They are important because they allow you to ask for an exact part of concept or whatever you are asking instead of the whole concept.
However, this system has a limited structure. This means that it can only recognise a concret kind of question.
A common Question Answering open-domain system is www.answers.com. There you have many answers and questions about subjects such as history, religion, society, legal issues, etc. For example, if you want to know who is Tom Cruise married to, you ask about it and then they show you directly the answer: Katie Holmes.
Another type of QA is question answering closed-domain system. An example of this system is Anna, from Ikea.
SOURCES:
- Question answering. (2009, June 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:48, June 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=296213100
- Answers.com (2009). In Answers.com. Retrieved 12:39, June 19, from http://www.answers.com
- Who is Tom Cruise married to (2009). In Wikianswers.com. Retrieved 12:50, June 19, from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who%20is%20Tom%20Cruise%20married%20to
- Ikea Help Centre (2009). In Ikea. Retrieved 12:55, June 19, from http://193.108.42.79/ikea-esen/cgi-bin/ikea-esen.cgi
