Question Answering in Restricted Domains: An Overview

Automated question answering has been a topic of research and development since the earliest AI applications. Computing power has increased since the first such systems were developed, and the general methodology has changed from the use of hand-encoded knowledge bases about simple domains to the use of text collections as the main knowledge source over more complex domains. Still, many research issues remain. The focus of this article is on the use of restricted domains for automated question answering. The article contains a historical perspective on question answering over restricted domains and an overview of the current methods and applications used in restricted domains. A main characteristic of question answering in restricted domains is the integration of domain-specific information that is either developed for question answering or that has been developed for other purposes. We explore the main methods developed to leverage this domain-specific information.

Published in Computational Linguistics, 33:1 (2007).

• MITPress entry
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List of Question Answering Systems in Restricted Domains

The following list is an updated on-line version of the apendix included in the article. If your system is not listed here or if you want to update the information regarding your system, please send an email to Diego Mollá with the details.

Generic Systems

• JAVELIN [22]
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ehn/JAVELIN/
• QUETAL [8], [7]
• http://www.dfki.de/pas/f2w.cgi?ltp/quetal-e
• AQUA [28], Vargas-VeraMD2003]
• http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/aqua/
• http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/publications.cfm
• START [14], [15], [16]
• http://start.csail.mit.edu/

Collaborative learning for engineering education

• KAAS [4]

Services provided by a large company

• Concordia University system [5]

Salmon fish biology

• SOK-I [9]

Biography information

• BioGrapher [27]
• BBN Technologies [30]

Tourism

• WEBCOOP [1]

Weather forecasts

• System by Korea University and Sangmyung University [2]

Technical domains

• ExtrAns [24]
• http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/cl/extrans/

• TeLQAS [12]
• http://www.neshatian.org/projects/telqas/

Genomics

• ExtrAns [23]
• System by KnowledgeTrail [10]

Financial

• System by KnowledgeTrail [11]

Medical domain

• EpoCare [21]
• system by University of Maryland [3]
• question classification by Columbia University and Cooper Union [31]
• IMIX [26]

Geographic domain

• System by UPC [6]

Nobel Prizes

• System by DFKI [8]

Language technology

• System by DFKI [8]

Opinion texts

• system by University of Southern California [17]

Reading Comprehension texts

• RC QA [25]

Role-playing games

• System by Microsoft Research [13]

References

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