A Chinese question answering system based on web search

With the rapid development of search engine technology, the massive information on the internet becomes increasingly easy to search and utilize. However, Reading a large number of web pages of search engine results is also a hard work for users. Therefore how to conveniently and directly get the answers is a recent research focus. In this paper, we put forward a Chinese question answering system which uses the real-time network information retrieved by search engines. By inputting a natural language question, users can get an accurate answer. There are three main steps to extract the answers in our system. First is the question analysis, extract keywords and type of the question. Then the second step is to retrieve relevant pages through web search engines. The last and most important step is answer extraction, evaluate all extracted candidate answers, and the final answer will be the one with highest score. In addition to the system implementation, we also evaluated the performance of our system with an artificial building question-answer dataset. And the results obviously proved the feasibility of our system.