Re: Anyone worked on Question Answering system?

Hello Roy, On 29-Oct-00 01:55:33, you wrote: >Has anyone worked on any "Question Answering System" such as AskJeeves.com >or TeRespondo.com (spanish)? I have developed a site almost 3 years ago that does something similar with a little different intent. I have written a book about Internet for a general audience. To let the potential buyers check in advance if the book talks about some issue that they may want to know, I let the users go into a page and place arbitrary questions. Then the question is analysed to "see" if it may be answered using excerpts of the book. If so, the user may read them online even with original pictures. There is also some tolerance to typos and it works regardless of the idiom in which the questions are posed. If you ask "what is a proxi?" it will figure that you are asking about proxy servers and present excerpts of the book about proxies in portuguese which is the idiom that the book and the site is in. I can't tell how many, but certainly many users bought the book after they have seen that it answers what they want to know. The site may be found here: http://www.e-na.net/ Another site that I co-developed using the same technology was able to let the different users publish documents in HTML and then it could analyse your document and suggest the insertion of links from key expressions in the added document to documents of related subjects already hosted in the site. The technology is completely based on PHP/MySQL but it could be abstracted to something else. One of these days I'll make time to release it. >I think this would be the most logic way.... I understand that these methods >will require thousands of questions in a database, to make it of any use, >but we are prepared to have people for this... The way it may work is to have a database to associate key expressions to each of the available answers. When a user asks a questions the database is checked. If the questions is not properly answer, a human operator may have to rework the key expressions to the correct answer if it exists or add a new answer if it doesn't. Regards, Manuel Lemos Web Programming Components using PHP Classes. Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/?user=mlemos@acm.org -- E-mail: mlemos@acm.org URL: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ PGP key: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ManuelLemos.pgp --