Synonyms
Web QA
Definition
A question answering (QA) system returns exact answers to questions posed by users in natural language, together with evidence supporting those answers. A Web QA system maintains a corpus of Web pages and other Web resources in order to determine these answers and to provide the required evidence.
A basic QA system might support only simple factual (or “factoid”) questions. For example, the user might pose the question
Q1. What is the population of India?
and receive the answer “1.2 billion,” with evidence provided by the CIA WorldFactbook. A more advanced QA system might support more complex questions, seeking opinions or relationships between entities. Answering these complex questions might require the combination and integration of information from multiple sources. For example, the user might pose the question
Q2. What methods are used to transport drugs from Mexico to the USA?
and hope to receive a summary of information drawn from newspaper articles...
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Clarke, C.L.A. (2018). Web Question Answering. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1363
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1363
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