QuestionAnswering.com
Title
AnswerBus Question Answering System
Description
About AnswerBus Question Answering System
AnswerBus is an open-domain question answering system based on sentence level information retrieval. It accepts users' natural-language questions in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and extracts possible answers from the Web. It can respond to users' questions within several seconds. Five search engines and directories (Google, Yahoo, WiseNut, AltaVista, and Yahoo News) are used to retrieve Web pages that potentially contain answers. From the Web pages, AnswerBus extracts sentences that are determined to contain answers. The current rate of correct answers to TREC-8's 200 questions is 70.5%. AnswerBus demonstrates that practical question answering on the Web is highly feasible.
Figure 1 describes the working process of AnswerBus. AnswerBus takes a user question in natural language. A simple language recognition module will determine whether the question is in English, or any of the other five languages. If the question language is not English, AnswerBus will send the original question and language information about the question to AltaVista's translation tool Babel Fish , and obtain the question that has been translated into English.
The rest of the process is comprised of mainly four steps: 1) select two or three search engines among five for information retrieval and form search engine specific queries based on the question; 2) contact the search engines and retrieve documents referred at the top of the hit lists; 3) extract sentences that potentially contain answers from the documents; 4) rank the answers and return the top choices with contextual URL links to the user. Instead of returning a snippet of fixed length text, AnswerBus return sentences as answers, thus provide users with some contextual information for the answers.
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