Automatic generation of question answering systems in restricted domains

Abstract

Question answering (QA) applications can be considered as the potential successors to the traditional information retrieval on the Web. However, QA systems should be adapted to restricted domains for the sake of precision. This adaptation is not a trivial task, since several heterogeneous resources related to a restricted domain must be integrated into existing QA systems. This paper presents the Maraqa tool, whose novelty is the use of software engineering techniques such as model driven development to automate the adaptation process. It is worth noting that Maraqa has been evaluated through a set of experiments (within the agricultural domain) that demonstrate its applicability: the precision of the adapted QA system showed 29.5% improvement.