An Overview of Question Answering System

A couple of decades ago research on Question Answering System (QAS) was started. Presently, there are many QASs available in the world. Still there is a need for development of QAS. The web is increasingly becoming an idle source of answer to different questions because of the tremendous amount of information that is now available online. The paper provides a complete overview of QAS. It presents the Question Answering (QA) task from an information retrieval perception and emphasizes the significance of retrieval models. The study suggests the architecture of QAS, gradually increasing the complexity of representation level of question and information object.