AnswerBus is an open-domain question answering system (QA) based on intelligent information retrieval. It accepts your questions in natural languages and extracts answers from the Web. Currently, You can use English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese as your languages.
The author of AnswerBus is Zhiping Zheng. You may contact him at zheng@answerbus.com.
Yes. The current URL is http://www.answerbus.com/. The system is not browser sensitive.
Yes. AnswerBus searches the Web for the information you need, just like a search engine.
And No. AnswerBus usually takes natural language questions instead of search query. It returns answers in a short list of sentences as answers to user's questions while search engines return lists of documents.
Both of them use natural language sentences as user interface. AskJeeves returns a list of documents containing certain words as its search result; AnswerBus returns a short list of sentences containing possible answers to the question. However, the sentences point to the Web documents (usually HTML documents) from which the sentences are extracted. So AskJeeves is more likely a search engine in usual sense.
Different QA systems use different approaches and focus on different aspects. It is very difficult to answer this question in general. http://www.answerbus.com/systems/ is a list of on-line QA systems. You may try and tell the differences. More detail technical evaluation on online QA systems can be found in the HLT paper presented in San Diego and WWW paper presented in Honululu.
There is a quick note page at http://www.answerbus.com/about/. You may also check out the short papers listed in last question. You are always welcome to contact the author for a more technical information.
AnswerBus has been on-line since November 2001. It is still very young and new features are added to the system every now and then.
Although AnswerBus is running on the Web just like a commercial application, it is still a research prototype. You can use it free.
Certainly you can. The author is also willing partially open the system to other groups for scientific research, student projects, NLP/AI/CL education. It is also possible to incorporate AnswerBus techniques into other information systems.
Any comments, critiques, suggestions are welcomed and your use of AnswerBus is the best help. The author is always happy to talk with you.
There are links to Answerbus from dozens academic research pages and hundreds collection, bookmark, weblog and other web pages. Some universities and institutes use AnswerBus as an example QA system for natural language processing, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence courses. Several review articles and stories about AnswerBus have been seen on the Web. AnswerBus serves thousands visitors all over the world every day.
Yes. The local archive version is even better than the Web version in some way. It was demonstrated in the Fifth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOG (TSD 2002) in Brno, Czech Republic. Check out /local/index.shtml for more details.
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