SBIR Phase I: Advanced Question Answering

这项小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段提案将使基于Language Computer Corporation(LCC)的先进技术开发商业产品成为可能。这项技术包括问答(Q/A)。为了实现这一目标，我们确定了几个研究目标。第一个是通过重新设计系统的关键组件：索引、搜索引擎和答案提取模块，利用这项技术开发出一个可行的商业产品。第二个目标是研究和设计一个可扩展的、能够同时服务于大量用户的分布式问答系统架构。第三个目标是提取用户档案信息，以提高服务质量和收入。最终目标是评估产品在实验室环境中的性能，以及在具有两个测试版客户的真实用户的小规模应用服务提供商(ASP)模型中的性能。建议的三种产品套件基于LCC管理团队在问答方面进行的前沿研究。这项工作的意义在于，通过开发健壮、可扩展的问答产品，它使搜索引擎技术离为用户提供准确而简洁的高质量信息又近了一步。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I proposal will enable the development of commercial products baced on the advanced technology of Language Computer Corporation (LCC). The technology involves Question Answering (Q/A). Several research objectives are identified to make this work. The first one is to develop a viable commercial product out of the technology by redesigning the key components of the system: indexing, search engine, and the answer extraction module. The second objective is to study and design a scalable, distributed Q/A system architecture capable of serving a large number of users simultaneously. The third objective is to extract user profile information for the purpose of increasing the service quality and revenues. The final objective is to evaluate the performance of the products in the laboratory environment, as well as in a small scale Application Service Provider (ASP) model with real users of two beta customers.The proposed suite of three products is based on leading edge research on question answering performed by the LCC management team. The significance of this work is that by developing robust, scalable question answering products, it takes the search engine technology a step closer to providing users with quality information that is accurate and concise.