New Directions In Question Answering

Key areas of research and development include current methods, architecture requirements, and the history of question answering on the Web; the development of systems to address new types of questions; interactivity; reuse of answers; advanced methods; and knowledge representation and reasoning used to support question answering.

Abstract

Next generation question answering systems are challenged on many fronts including but not limited to massive, heterogeneous and sometimes streaming collections, diverse and challenging users, and the need to be sensitive to context, ambiguity, and even deception. This chapter describes new directions in question answering (QA) including enhanced question processing, source selection, document retrieval, answer determination, and answer presentation generation. We consider important directions such as answering questions in context (e.g., previous queries, day or time, the data, the task, location of the interactive device), scenario based QA, event and temporal QA, spatial QA, opinionoid QA, multimodal QA, multilingual QA, user centered and collaborative QA, explanation, interactive QA, QA reuse, and novel architectures for QA. The chapter concludes by outlining a roadmap of the future of question answering, articulating necessary resources for, impediments to, and planned or possible future capabilities.