A Natural Language Question Answering System-an Application for e-learning

This paper describes a natural language question answering system that can be used by students in getting as solution to their queries. Unlike AI question answering system that focus on the generation of new answers, the present system retrieves existing ones from question-answer files. Unlike information retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, it uses a semantic knowledge base (WordNet) to improve its ability to match question. Paper describes the design and the current implementation of the system as an intelligent tutoring system. Main drawback of the existing tutoring systems is that the computer poses a question to the students and guides them in reaching the solution to the problem. In the present approach, a student asks any question related to the topic and gets a suitable reply. Based on his query, he can either get a direct answer to his question or a set of questions (to a maximum of 3 or 4) which bear the greatest resemblance to the user input. We further analyze-application fields for such kind of a system and discuss the scope for future research in this area.