Developing a Web-based Question Answering System

摘要

AnswerBus is an open-domain question answering system based on sentence level Web information retrieval. It accepts users' natural-language questions in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and provides answers in English. Five search engines and directories are used to retrieve Web pages that are relevant to user questions. From the Web pages, AnswerBus extracts sentences that are determined to contain answers. Its current rate of correct answers to TREC- 8's 200 questions is 70.5% with the average response time to the questions being seven seconds. The performance of AnswerBus in terms of accuracy and response time is better than other similar systems.