2. The returned text passages present the answer
In the fields of Question Answering and Web
in context and thus help users to validate the
Search, the issue how answers/results should be pre-
answer–there always will be the odd case where
sented is a vital one. Nevertheless, as of today, the
a system returns a wrong result.
majority of QA system–which a few notable excep-
1
for Question Answering with Linguistic Methodstions, e.g. MIT’s START (Katz et al., 2002)–are
32
Figure 1: Screenshot of QuALiM’s response to the question “How many Munros are there in Scotland?” The greenbar to the left indicates that the system is confident to have found the right answer, which is shown in bold: “284”.Furthermore, one Wikipedia paragraph which contains additional information of potential interest to the user is dis-played. In this paragraph the sentence containing the answer is highlighted. This display of context also allows theuser to validate the answer.
one answer length, but always presents a combina-
still experimental and research-oriented and typi-
cally only return the answer itself. Yet it is highly
tion of three different lengths to the user (see Figure
doubtful that this is the best strategy.
