The search of answers, called in English Question Answering (QA) is a type of recovery of the information. Given a certain quantity of documents (such as World Wide Web), the system should be capable of recovering answers to questions raised in natural language. QA is observed as a method that needs a technology of Processing of natural language more complex that other types of systems for the Recovery of documents, and, in some cases, it is observed as a step ahead of the technology of the seeker.
A system of question answering is one of the most complex systems concerning the recovery of information. We must bear in mind that a system based on the question-answering is much more difficult than a normal system that entrusts to look for an information in a more or less big quantity of documents, since these it must extract from the above mentioned documents a fragment of (minimal) text that answers to a question given in natural language. These systems are very tied to the seekers web.
A system of question-answering tries to recognize a wide range of types of questions, including facts, lists, definitions, since, when, where, for which, etc. The above mentioned searches can change from small collections of local documents, internal organizations of documents, up to the entire web (or a part of it).
Here we can see a picture of the Question Answering System:
References:
- Question Answering (2009. In Wikipedia. Retrieved 16:38, May 16, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=278611780
- Sistemas de Question Answering. Retrieved 16:42, May 16, 2009, from: http://question-answering.orgfree.com/
- Multilingual Question Answering. Retrieved 15:45, May 16, 2009, from: http://question-answering.orgfree.com/
