Question answering system: A heuristic approach

Abstract

The exponential growth in digital information led to the need of increasingly sophisticated search tools like the web search engines. Search engines return ranked list of documents and are less effective when users need precise answers to natural language questions. Question Answering systems involve this critical capability required for the next generation web search engines, to reduce the painstaking search through the long list of documents. The proposed solution of Question Answering system works for a specific domain of tourism which is a global and routine activity for leisure. The users have to struggle to navigate through these overloaded sites for a short piece of information of their interest. The crawler developed in the system gathers web page information which is processed using Natural Language Processing and Procedure programming for a specific keyword. The system returns precise short string answers or list to natural language questions related to tourism domain like distance, person, date, list of hotels, list of forts, etc.