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Concept
Question answering
Summary
Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP) that is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions that are posed by humans in a natural language.
A question-answering implementation, usually a computer program, may construct its answers by querying a structured database of knowledge or information, usually a knowledge base. More commonly, question-answering systems can pull answers from an unstructured collection of natural language documents.
Some examples of natural language document collections used for question answering systems include:
a collection of reference texts
internal organization documents and web pages
compiled newswire reports
a set of Wikipedia pages
a subset of World Wide Web pages
Question-answering research attempts to develop ways of answering a wide range of question types, including fact, list, definition, how, why, hypothetical, semantically constrained, and cross-lingual questions.
Answering questions related to an article in order to evaluate reading comprehension is one of the simpler form of question answering, since a given article is relatively short compared to the domains of other types of question-answering problems. An example of such a question is "What did Albert Einstein win the Nobel Prize for?" after an article about this subject is given to the system.
Closed-book question answering is when a system has memorized some facts during training and can answer questions without explicitly being given a context. This is similar to humans taking closed-book exams.
Closed-domain question answering deals with questions under a specific domain (for example, medicine or automotive maintenance) and can exploit domain-specific knowledge frequently formalized in ontologies. Alternatively, "closed-domain" might refer to a situation where only a limited type of questions are accepted, such as questions asking for descriptive rather than procedural information.
Official source
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