Question-answering in webtalk: an evaluation study

WebTalk is an intelligent agent that automatically mines company websites to create interactive spoken and chat-based dialog systems. In this paper, we briefly describe the technologies that WebTalk utilizes for extracting task knowledge from websites and answering questions specified in natural language. We elaborate on an evaluation of the question answering component of WebTalk. In particular, we compare this component with a deployed hand-crafted question answering agent. A detailed evaluation analysis is presented.