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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4637–4643Cite as

Web Question Answering

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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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Charles L. A. Clarke

Authors
  1. Charles L. A. Clarke
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charles L. A. Clarke .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Google Research, New York, NY, USA

    Cong Yu

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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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