A Survey on Why-Type Question Answering Systems
This is an incremental survey for researchers in natural language processing and information retrieval, focusing on fact-finding and analysis applications.
The paper presents a survey on Why-type question answering systems, detailing their architecture and processes to reduce answer retrieval time compared to search engines, and suggests further research avenues.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Baidu yield information in the form of a relevant set of web pages according to the need of the user. Question Answering Systems reduce the time taken to get an answer, to a query asked in natural language by providing the one most relevant answer. To the best of our knowledge, major research in Why-type questions began in early 2000's and our work on Why-type questions can help explore newer avenues for fact-finding and analysis. The paper presents a survey on Why-type Question Answering System, details the architecture, the processes involved in the system and suggests further areas of research.