AN AUTOMATIC WEB-BASED QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEM FOR E-LEARNING

Abstract

An automatic web based Question Answering (QA) system is a valuable tool for improving e-learning and education. Several approaches employ natural language processing technology to understand questions given in natural language text, which is incomplete and error-prone. In addition, instead of extracting exact answer, many approaches simply return hyperlinks to documents containing the answers, which is inconvenient for the students or learners. In this paper we develop technique to detect the type of a question, based on which the proper technique for extracting the answer is used. The system returns only blocks or phrases of data containing the answer rather than full documents. Therefore, we can highly improve the efficiency of Web QA systems for e-learning.

Keywords

• Technology-Enhanced Learning
• Question Answering Systems
• e-Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• ICT in Education