One of the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems were Question Answer systems (QA) called BASEBALL and LUNAR, both developed in the 1960s. These systems were very effective. LUNAR, for example, was demonstrated in 1971 that it was able to answer 90% of the questions. But two of the most famous early systems were SHRDLU, which simulated in s toy world the operation of a robot, and ELIZA, which simulated a conversation with a psychologist. The 1970s and 1980s the development came with the Computational linguistic, which were projects in text comprehension and question answering. An example of it was the Unix Consultant (UC). With the expansion Word Wide Web there was, and there is, an integration of question answering with web search, like Ask.com or Google.
A Question Answering system (QA) that answers automatically question posed in natural language. The QA computer program finds the answer to a question in a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents. The system answers to question types including definition, list, fact, why, how, semantically constrained, hypothetical and cross-lingual questions.
One of the problems of the QA is the word sense disambiguation that lies to the software programs that have been designed to interpret language. The main thing is that the ambiguous words or sentences can be understood in multiple ways, not only one meaning is intended. This area for the programmers is extremely challenging because they have to designe interfaces to link the gap between spoken and written language.
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*What is Word Sense Disambiguation?.By R. Kayne. In wiseGEEK, clear answers for common questions. Retrieved 20:40, May 29, 2009, from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-word-sense-disambiguation.htm
*AnswerBus, Question Answering System. (2001-2008). Retrieved 20:43, May 29, 2009, from http://www.answerbus.com/index.shtml
*Question Answering. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:59, May 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering
