New Directions In Question Answering

Question answering systems, which provide natural language responses to naturallanguage queries, are the subject of rapidly advancing research encompassing both academic study andcommercial applications, the most well-known of which is the search engine Ask Jeeves. Questionanswering draws on different fields and technologies, including natural language processing,information retrieval, explanation generation, and human computer interaction. Question answeringcreates an important new method of information access and can be seen as the natural step beyondsuch standard Web search methods as keyword query and document retrieval. This collection chartssignificant new directions in the field, including temporal, spatial, definitional, biographical,multimedia, and multilingual question answering.After an introduction that defines essentialterminology and provides a roadmap to future trends, the book covers key areas of research anddevelopment. These include current methods, architecture requirements, and the history of questionanswering on the Web; the development of systems to address new types of questions; interactivity,which is often required for clarification of questions or answers; reuse of answers; advancedmethods; and knowledge representation and reasoning used to support question answering. Each sectioncontains an introduction that summarizes the chapters included and places them in context, relatingthem to the other chapters in the book as well as to the existing literature in the field andassessing the problems and challenges that remain.