IBM Watson is a cognitive computing system capable of question answering in natural languages. It is believed that IBM Watson can understand large corpora and answer relevant questions more effectively than any other question-answering system currently available. To unleash the full power of Watson, however, we need to train its instance with a large number of wellprepared question-answer pairs...

In this paper, we describe a Turkish factoid QA system which uses surface level patterns called answer patterns in order to extract the answers from the documents that are retrieved from the web. The answer patterns are learned using five different answer pattern extraction methods with the help of the web. Our novel approach to extract named entity tagged answer patterns and our new confidence...

One of the biggest bottlenecks for conversational systems is large-scale provision of suitable content. In this paper, we present the use of content mined from online question-and-answer forums to automatically construct system utterances. Although this content is mined in the form of question-answer pairs, our system is able to use it to formulate utterances that drive a conversation, not just...

Nowadays, people use online social networks almost every day. They activate either due to their interests, or to search or catch their desirable information. Users of online social networks generate structural and contextual traces that can be analyzed by, i.e., network science researchers. Researchers can describe networks fabricated out of online traces from different perspectives that one of...

Question answering (NLQA) systems which retrieve a textual fragment from a document collection that represents the answer to a question are an active field of research. But evaluations currently involve a large amount of manual effort. We propose a new evaluation scheme that uses the insertion of answers from Frequently Asked Questions collections (FAQs) to measure the ability of a system to re...

Motivated by the continuous growth of the Web in the number of sites and users, several search engines attempt to extend their traditional functionality by incorporating question answering (QA) facilities. This extension seems natural but it is not straightforward since current QA systems still achieve poor performance rates for languages other than English. Based on the fact that retrieval eff...