A Question Answering System in its infancy

David Steimle

To answer the typical questions of first-year university students, an automatic question answering mechanism is being developed at the Institute of Communication Research and Phonetics in Bonn, Germany. A corpus was assembled to identify possible questions students could ask. These will be parsed and translated according to a specific query format. An ontological component will process those inquiries. Its results will yield the answer, still in machine readable format. Text synthesis will then be used to generate a reply in natural, human readable language. Due to its modularised component structure the system will be easy to maintain, while also allowing for a web interface to handle students' questions.