Development of Q&A systems using AcQA

• Main Author: Azevedo, Renato Preigschadt de
• Publication Date: 2020
• Other Authors: Pereira, Maria João, Henriques, Pedro Rangel
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/22793
• topic: Question & answering; DSL; Natural language processing

In order to help the user to search for relevant information, Question and Answering (Q&A) Systems provide the possibility to formulate the question freely in a natural language, retrieving the most appropriate and concise answers. These systems interpret the user question to understand his information needs and return him the more adequate replies in a semantic sense; they do not perform a statistical word search like happens in the existing search engines. There are several approaches to developing and deploying Q&A Systems, making it hard to choose the best way to build the system. To turn easier this process, we are proposing a way to automatically create Q&A Systems (AcQA) based on DSLs, thus allowing the setup and the validation of the Q&A System independent of the implementation techniques. With our proposal (AcQA language), we want the developers to focus on the data and contents, instead of implementation details. We conducted an experiment to assess the feasibility of using AcQA. The study was carried out with people from the computer science field and shows that our language simplifies the development of a Q&A System.