Types of Questions in Questions Answering Systems
In this article I will explain the 6 types of questions that questions answering systems expect from users, namely: factoid questions, confirmation questions, listing questions, descriptive questions, hypothetical questions and complex questions.
What is Question Answering System?
Maybe the name of the system (question answering) is very self-explanatory, however let me first explain how it is different from the typical (Google-style search engine).
The Internet is one of the main sources of information today. A vast number of people rely on the Internet on a daily basis to get their answers. Usually, we use search engines to find information we are looking for, but what do we get from the results? And how time time do we need to get the exact answer we are looking for? Let’s try this question in Google: “is vaccination required to fly in Europe”?
I understand that this might be very difficult to answer because of the fast changing regulations with regard to COVID-19, however the answer must be there somewhere, if you are vaccinated nowadays you can fly around Europe (as of 21.11.2021) for sure, but let’s look at the following result page from Google:
