Hi I'm Allen Weeks, over the summer I worked on a question and answer system with Melbourne IT.
Mentor
During the project I was guided by my mentor Dr Trevor Hales. His insights into the applications of the system were extremely useful, and especially the help he gave in differentiating it from the competing products.
Proposed Research
The original proposal was for a system that would allow a user to enter a question in plain English, and obtain a solution to that question. The solution would be found from a set of known answers, instead of the system working it out for itself. When a question is asked for which no answer is known, the question is referred to a human administrator for solving.
If a similar question had already been seen by the system it could present the answer it has been told solves that problem. If undecided, it would show several possible questions and allow the user to select the best. By obtaining user feedback as to the suitability of an answer the responses for future queries could be improved.
Actual Work Completed
Over the two month period of the project, the following were done:
There were two prototypes constructed, and many other incomplete algorithms designed. An attempt was made to find a way of satisfactorily answering questions without any knowledge of deep semantic meaning. No algorithm was found that could find an answer to a known question using only syntactic knowledge.
The future
It seems that further progress in this project would be very difficult, as a 'true' NLP implementation requires extraordinary effort and skill, and the intermediate methods are not up to it.
In addition, toward the end it was discovered that another group had announced a far superior technology, though not a directly competing product. If the claims of this group are true they could easily create a superior product at any time.
email me for further information:amwe@ee.mu.oz.au
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