Knowledge and reasoning for question answering: Research perspectives

This paper presents a roadmap of current promising research tracks in question answering with a focus on knowledge acquisition and reasoning. We show that many current techniques developed in the frame of text mining and natural language processing are ready to be integrated in question answering search systems. Their integration opens new avenues of research for factual answer finding and for advanced question answering. Advanced question answering refers to a situation where an understanding of the meaning of the question and the information source together with techniques for answer fusion and generation are needed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.