TeLQAS (Telecommunication Literature Question Answering System) is an experimental

question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP) that is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions that are posed by humans in a n ...

system developed for answering English questions in the

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

domain.

Architecture

TeLQAS includes three main subsystems: an online subsystem, an offline subsystem, and an

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

. The online subsystem answers questions submitted by users in real time. During the online process, TeLQAS processes the question using a

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

component that implements

part-of-speech tagging In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging, PoS tagging, or POST), also called grammatical tagging, is the process of marking up a word in a text ( corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its defini ...

and simple

syntactic parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''pa ...

. The online subsystem also utilizes an inference engine in order to carry out necessary inference on small elements of knowledge. The offline subsystem automatically indexes documents collected by a ''focused

web crawler Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spider ...

'' from the web. An ontology server along with its

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

is used for knowledge representation.Kourosh Neshatian and Mahmoud R. Hejazi, ''An Object Oriented Ontology Interface for Information Retrieval Purposes in Telecommunication Domain'', International Symposium on Telecommunication (IST2003). The main concepts and classes of the ontology are created by domain experts. Some of these classes, however, can be instantiated automatically by the offline components.

References

Computational linguistics Information retrieval systems Natural language processing software