theorywatch

Dmitri Roussinov has an excellent article on the state of the art in question-answering systems that respond to natural-language queries in his “Beyond Keywords: Automated Question Answering on the Web” in the September issue of Communications of the ACM. The article moves beyond the typical “closed domain” (or “fixed corpus”) QA systems tested in TREC competitions to consider automated open domain (or “open corpus”) QA systems, most of which are still in research prototype stages. Roussinov concludes that open domain QA systems need to address the following technical challenges: scalability, credibility, and usability, and that the next ten years will see these challenges solved. So does this mean the end of mediated online “ready reference” in libraries, as Joe Janes has already remarked in another context?

So here’s our bonus ready reference question of the day: during what years respectively did Janes and Roussinov teach at Syracuse? (And how did you search for the answer, hmm?)

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