Versatile question answering systems: Seeing in synthesis

Abstract

Recent advances in massive information storage and growth of internet have led to increased necessity of tools such as search engines and QA systems to get meaningful answers from the vast amount of information. The complex questions appearing in real-life generally require multiple techniques or sub-division of question at various levels. Several practical systems have been developed to explore this. This paper reviews state-of-art QA systems which provide enhanced and versatile functionality at various levels in their architecture and then makes the following contributions: © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.