Design and implementation of Turkish question answering system

In this study, we investigated the design and implementation of named-entity (NE) based question answering system for Turkish text collections. Researches and works on this subject have shown that question answering systems has a complex structure composed of several modules. Thus, we first discussed the structure of a question answering system in three basic phases: question processing, document analysis and answer processing.Firstly, we developed named-entity recognition (NER) tool, which is capable to manage extended named entity hierarchy, annotate data collection, rule-based and dictionary-based named entities extraction and provides a performance evaluation. We also provide a set of rules and dictionaries for NER in Turkish and we present the whole application system in detail. We run a set of experimentation to evaluate the performance of NER system using METU Turkish Corpus. The results we gained from experimentations show that our NER approach produced good results.Then, we propose a new approach, which is named-entity based Questions Answering system for Turkish collections. We designed and implemented our system in structure of boolean information retrieval. We created the structure of indexing for information retrieval and retrieved the relevant documents as results. Then, we found named entities in documents and questions and we matched them using named entity hierarchy. In summary, this work is a starting work in this research area and is thought to produce the best results in terms of performance.