Modeling of the Question Answering Task in the YodaQA System

We briefly survey the current state of art in the field of Question Answering and present the YodaQA system, an open source framework for this task and a baseline pipeline with reasonable performance. We take a holistic approach, reviewing and aiming to integrate many different question answering task definitions and approaches concerning classes of knowledge bases, question representation and answer generation. To ease performance comparisons of general-purpose QA systems, we also propose an effort in building a new reference QA testing corpus which is a curated and extended version of the TREC corpus.