A Natural language processing application running on internet : A question answering system

ABSTRACT The easiest and common way to achieve information is Internet. The easiest way to achieve information on Internet is using a search engine. But user most do extra processes (selection of keywords, research on result pages and web sites) while using a search engine. These extra processes can be done automatically for some kind of queries. The systems, that accepts user queries in natural language and results in only answer not a document list, are named Question- Answering Systems. The instances of these systems are exist for English. In this study, a Question-Answering system is built for Turkish. The system converts user question in natural language to search engine query and sends these queries to a search engine and receives result page. In result page and the web pages which web addresses are in result page, the answer candidate sentences are selected. The candidate answers are ranked according to four criteria. The five candidates which have the highest scores are the answers. The system is examined with 524 questions. 43% of questions are answers correctly in first five sentences when the result page of search engine was used. 60% of questions are answers correctly in first five sentences when the real pages (at the result page's links) was used. Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Question Answering Systems. IX