OpenEphyra

Open-domain question answering systems in general seek to answer questions in natural language with answers in their document collection. Rather than returning a link to a document similar to a question, the answer is returned with a link to where the answer was found.

Recently I read that it would be rare to find a software package including all the pieces to a question answering system. There are usually many pieces to such systems gathered from text mining and natural language processing, as well as several tuned parameters. However, the good news for the question answering community is that there is now an open source system available: OpenEphyra. This system has been put together by a Ph.D. student at CMU, Nico Schlaefer. The system appears to be easily extensible. It has built functionality to test the system on TREC QA track competitions. Great work Nico Schlaefer and any else who have helped.