Natural Language Question Answering in Open Domains

With the ever-growing volume of information on the web, the traditional search engines, returning hundreds or thousands of documents per query, become more and more demanding on the user patience in satisfying his/her information needs. Question Answering in Open Domains is a top research and development topic in current language technology. Unlike the standard search engines, based on the latest Information Retrieval (IR) methods, open domain question-answering systems are expected to deliver not a list of documents that might be relevant for the user's query, but a sentence or a paragraph answering the question asked in natural language. This paper reports on the construction and testing of a Question Answering (QA) system which builds on several web services developed at the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ICIA/RACAI). The evaluation of the system has been independently done by the organizers of the Re-sPubliQA 2009 exercise and has been rated the best performing system with the highest improvement due to the natural language processing technology over a baseline state-of-the-art IR system. The system was trained on a specific corpus, but its functionality is independent on the linguistic register of the training data.