Design, Development and Implementation
of Question Answering Systems

Zhiping Zheng

Computational Linguistics Department

Saarland University

Postfach 15 11 50

66041 Saarbrücken, Germany

Email: zheng@coli.uni-sb.de

Tel: +49 681 302 3829

Motivation and Objectives:

Question answering (QA) research is a promising task in computational linguistics area. However, it is still in its very early stage. More and more industrial and/or academic research groups join in the research and several sub-intelligent systems are now on the Web. Although most QA systems have similar structure, every system is different from others, not only the performance, but also the focus, design method, knowledge base and many others. Thus, some of the experiences of building QA systems are very useful to other researchers but very difficult to summarize. This tutorial is intended to bring some newest development and research in this area and exhibit many real examples to look inside real QA systems closely and from different aspects, synthesize research results and experiences from different research groups, summarize what are possible, what are helpful, and what are essential in building a real-world QA system.