SBIR Phase I: Advanced Question Answering

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.