AQA: Automatic Question Answering System for Czech

Question answering (QA) systems have become popular nowadays, however, a majority of them concentrates on the English language and most of them are oriented to a specific limited problem domain. In this paper, we present a new question answering system called AQA (Automatic Question Answering). AQA is an open-domain QA system which allows users to ask all common questions related to a selected text collection. The first version of the AQA system is developed and tested for the Czech language, but we also plan to include more languages in future versions. The AQA strategy consists of three main parts: question processing, answer selection and answer extraction. All modules are syntax-based with advanced scoring obtained by a combination of TF-IDF, tree distance between the question and candidate answers and other selected criteria. The answer extraction module utilizes named entity recognizer which allows the system to catch entities that are most likely to answer the question. Evaluation of the AQA system is performed on a previously published Simple Question-Answering Database, or SQAD, with more than 3,000 question-answer pairs.