A HindiQuestion Answering systemforE-learning documents

Toempower thegeneral massthrough access toinformation andknowledge, organized efforts arebeing madetodevelop relevant content inlocallanguages andprovide local language capabilities toutility software. Wehavedeveloped a Question Answering (QA)System forHindidocuments that wouldberelevant formassesusingHindiasprimary language ofeducation. Theusershould beabletoaccess information fromE-learning documents ina userfriendly way,that isbyquestioning thesystem intheir native language Hindi andthesystem will return theintended answer (also in Hindi) bysearching incontext fromtherepository ofHindi documents. Thelanguage constructs, querystructure, commonwords, etc.arecompletely different inHindias compared toEnglish. A novelstrategy, inaddition to conventional search andNLP techniques, wasusedto construct theHindi QAsystem. Thefocus isoncontext based retrieval ofinformation. Forthis purpose weimplemented a Hindi search engine that works onlocality-based similarity heuristics toretrieve relevant passages fromthecollection. It alsoincorporates language analysis modules like stemmer andmorphological analyzer aswellasself constructed lexical database ofsynonyms. Theexperimental results over corpus oftwoimportant domains ofagriculture andscience showeffectiveness ofourapproach.