Building an application of question answering system from scratch

A step by step guide for beginners

Hiroki Nakayama
Towards Data Science

Alfred Sisley / Public domain from Wikimedia

Question Answering(QA) system is a system that gives appropriate answers to questions expressed in natural languages such as English, Chinese, and so on. For example, suppose a user asks “When was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?” In this case, the question answering system is expected to return “Apr 15, 1865”. Below is an example of question-answer pairs.

An example of question-answer pairs from Speech and Language Processing Chapter 25.

A question answering system will help you find information efficiently. Generally speaking, we use search engines to search for relevant documents when we look for some information on the Web. However, because they show you documents, you must read the documents and decide whether they contain the information you need. It’s a bother. Thus, commercial search engines have a question answering feature so that you can find information efficiently.

Question Answering by Bing search.

Question answering systems have several paradigms, but two major paradigms have been used…

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Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Thank you for sharing the article. Though I encountered one problem while installing all required software (I had to install en_core_web_sm explicitly), I could make your program work and could test it. The program answered correctly for a few…...

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