Information Access Using Natural Language

Motivation: To address the problem of information overload in today’s world, we have developed START, a natural language question answering system that provides users with high-precision multimedia information access through the use of natural language annotations. To address the difficulty of accessing large amounts of heterogeneous data, we have developed Omnibase, which assists START by integrating structured and semistructured Web databases into a single, uniformly structured “virtual database.” Our ultimate goal is to develop a computer system that acts like a “smart reference librarian.”