Question Answering: A Survey of Research, Techniques and Issues

With the huge amount of data available on web, it has turned out to be a fertile area for Question Answering (QA) research. Question answering, an instance of information retrieval research is at the cross road from several research communities such as, machine learning, statistical learning, natural language processing and pattern learning. In this paper, the authors survey the research in area of question answering with respect to different prospects of NLP, machine learning, statistical learning and pattern learning. Then they situate some of the prominent QA systems concerning these prospects and present a comparative study on the basis of question types.