The Role of Information Retrieval in the Question Answering System IRSAW

Information on the internet is a vast resourcefor question answering. As the amount ofavailable information from web pages increases,novel methods for finding precise answers touser queries and questions must be found. Stan-dard information retrieval methods are efficient,but often fail to provide a user with short, pre-cise answers. A deep linguistic analysis ofall information is time consuming, but it offersmore advanced means to find answers to a user’squestion. Shallow natural language processingmethods seem to work well on a limited rangeof questions, but they are not suitable for findinganswers to more complex questions.This paper describes work in progress on thequestion answering system IRSAW