Adapting question answering techniques to the Web

The Web has emerged as a huge information repository that can be used for various knowledge based applications, an important one being question answering (QA). The paper discusses the issues involved in using Web as a knowledge base for question answering involving simple factual questions. It also proposes some simple but effective methods to adapt traditional QA methods to deal with efficient these issues and lead to an accurate and efficient question answering system. The paper discusses the architecture and design of our system. The empirical results obtained on the current system are encouraging.