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 natural language .
62-453: WolframAlpha ( / ˈ w ʊ l f . r əm -/ WUULf-rəm- ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research . It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009, and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Mathematica , a technical computing platform. WolframAlpha gathers data from academic and commercial websites such as
124-698: A general multi-paradigm programming language, and implemented in Mathematica . Wolfram language is proprietary and is not commonly used by developers. WolframAlpha was used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines but is no longer used to provide search results. For factual question answering , WolframAlpha was used by Apple's Siri in October 2011 and Amazon Alexa in December 2018 for math and science queries. Users would notice that
186-459: A knowledge base of curated , structured data that come from other sites and books. It can respond to particularly phrased natural language fact-based questions. It displays its "Input interpretation" of such a question, using standardized phrases. It can also parse mathematical symbolism and respond with numerical and statistical results. WolframAlpha is written in the Wolfram Language ,
248-489: A free software law in January 2006. Decree No. 3,390 mandated all government agencies to migrate to free software over a two-year period. Publiccode.eu is a campaign launched demanding a legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well. The French Gendarmerie and
310-462: A large, unstructured, natural language text corpus. The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of comprehensive theories in computational linguistics , which led to the development of ambitious projects in text comprehension and question answering. One example was the Unix Consultant (UC), developed by Robert Wilensky at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1980s. The system answered questions pertaining to
372-460: A mathematical formula retrieved from Wikidata as a succinct answer, translated into a computable form that allows the user to insert values for the variables. The system retrieves names and values of variables and common constants from Wikidata if those are available. It is claimed that the system outperforms a commercial computational mathematical knowledge engine on a test set. MathQA is hosted by Wikimedia at https://mathqa.wmflabs.org/ . In 2022, it
434-499: A period of one year . LUNAR answered questions about the geological analysis of rocks returned by the Apollo Moon missions. Both question answering systems were very effective in their chosen domains. LUNAR was demonstrated at a lunar science convention in 1971 and it was able to answer 90% of the questions in its domain that were posed by people untrained on the system. Further restricted-domain question answering systems were developed in
496-432: A post-work society. He argues that the combination of a manipulation of intellectual property law and private property to make goods available to the public and a thorough blend between labor and fun make the free software movement a communist economy . Since its inception, there is an ongoing contention between the many FLOSS organizations ( FSF , OSI , Debian , Mozilla Foundation , Apache Foundation , etc.) within
558-454: A practical question rather than an ethical dilemma – non-free software is not the best solution but nonetheless a solution. The free software movement views free software as a moral imperative: that proprietary software should be rejected, and that only free software should be developed and taught in order to make computing technology beneficial to the general public. Although the movements have differing values and goals, collaborations between
620-411: A query in its logical form . Accepting natural language questions makes the system more user-friendly, but harder to implement, as there are a variety of question types and the system will have to identify the correct one in order to give a sensible answer. Assigning a question type to the question is a crucial task; the entire answer extraction process relies on finding the correct question type and hence
682-473: A retriever-reader architecture. The retriever is aimed at retrieving relevant documents related to a given question, while the reader is used to infer the answer from the retrieved documents. Systems such as GPT-3 , T5, and BART use an end-to-end architecture in which a transformer-based architecture stores large-scale textual data in the underlying parameters. Such models can answer questions without accessing any external knowledge sources. Question answering
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#1732891328634744-574: A set of formula variants. Subsequently, the variables are substituted with random values to generate a large number of different questions suitable for individual student tests. PhysWikiquiz is hosted by Wikimedia at https://physwikiquiz.wmflabs.org/ . Question answering systems have been extended in recent years to encompass additional domains of knowledge For example, systems have been developed to automatically answer temporal and geospatial questions, questions of definition and terminology, biographical questions, multilingual questions, and questions about
806-419: A stall at software-related conferences to raise awareness of software freedom. This is seen as important since people who receive free software, but who are not aware that it is free software, will later accept a non-free replacement or will add software that is not free software. A lot of lobbying work has been done against software patents and expansions of copyright law . Other lobbying focuses directly on
868-574: A structured database of knowledge or information, usually a knowledge base . More commonly, question-answering systems can pull answers from an unstructured collection of natural language documents. Some examples of natural language document collections used for question answering systems include: Question-answering research attempts to develop ways of answering a wide range of question types, including fact, list, definition , how, why, hypothetical, semantically constrained, and cross-lingual questions. Another way to categorize question-answering systems
930-430: Is a challenging problem because semantic relatedness is not trivial. The lab was motivated by the fact that 20% of mathematical queries in general-purpose search engines are expressed as well-formed questions. The challenge contained two separate sub-tasks. Task 1: "Answer retrieval" matching old post answers to newly posed questions, and Task 2: "Formula retrieval" matching old post formulae to new questions. Starting with
992-511: Is a serious concern in the FLOSS domain due to increased complexity of license compatibility considerations which limits and complicates source code reuse between FLOSS projects. The OSI and the FSF maintain their own lists of dozens of existing and acceptable FLOSS licenses. There is an agreement among most that the creation of new licenses should be minimized and those created should be made compatible with
1054-474: Is by the technical approach used. There are a number of different types of QA systems, including Rule-based systems use a set of rules to determine the correct answer to a question. Statistical systems use statistical methods to find the most likely answer to a question. Hybrid systems use a combination of rule-based and statistical methods. Two early question answering systems were BASEBALL and LUNAR. BASEBALL answered questions about Major League Baseball over
1116-658: Is dependent on a good search corpus ; without documents containing the answer, there is little any question answering system can do. Larger collections generally mean better question answering performance, unless the question domain is orthogonal to the collection. Data redundancy in massive collections, such as the web, means that nuggets of information are likely to be phrased in many different ways in differing contexts and documents, leading to two benefits: Some question answering systems rely heavily on automated reasoning . In information retrieval , an open-domain question answering system tries to return an answer in response to
1178-465: Is not easy to raise money for free software projects. The free software movement champions copyleft licensing schema (often pejoratively called " viral licenses "). In its strongest form, copyleft mandates that any works derived from copyleft-licensed software must also carry a copyleft license, so the license spreads from work to work like a computer virus might spread from machine to machine. Stallman has previously stated his opposition to describing
1240-437: Is reinforced by fact that majority of OSI-approved licenses and self-avowed open-source programs are also compatible with the free software formalisms and vice versa. While free and open source software are often linked together, they offer two separate ideas and values. Richard Stallman has referred to open source as " a non-movement ", as it " does not campaign for anything ". "Open source" addresses software being open as
1302-526: Is software piracy. Promotion of adoption of FOSS is essential however it comes with problems of proprietary anti competition software practices including indulging in bribing and corruption by government departments. Pakistan works on the introduction of usage of open type basis of source Solutions in the curricula in schools and colleges. This is because of FOSS uniqueness in terms of political, democratic and social varieties of aspect regarding information communication and technology. In
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#17328913286341364-649: Is termed free software . Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project . Stallman later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. The philosophy of the Free Software Movement is based on promoting collaboration between programmers and computer users. This process necessitates
1426-402: Is the willingness of programmers in the free software movement to work, often producing higher-quality than proprietary programmers, without financial compensation . In his 1998 article "The High-Tech Gift Economy", Richard Barbrook suggested that the then-nascent free software movement represented a return to the gift economy building on hobbyism and the absence of economic scarcity on
1488-451: Is where people get the misconception of "free": there is no wrong in programmers' requesting payment for a proposed project, or charging for copies of free software. Restricting and controlling the user's decisions on use is the actual violation of freedom. Stallman defends that in some cases, monetary incentive is not necessary for motivation since the pleasure in expressing creativity is a reward in itself. Conversely, Stallman admits that it
1550-674: The CIA 's The World Factbook , the United States Geological Survey , a Cornell University Library publication called All About Birds , Chambers Biographical Dictionary , Dow Jones , the Catalogue of Life , CrunchBase , Best Buy , and the FAA to answer queries. A Spanish language version was launched in 2022. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. WolframAlpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from
1612-587: The French National Assembly utilize the open source operating system Linux . Gov.uk keeps a list of "key components, tools and services that have gone into the construction of GOV.UK". Free Software events happening all around the world connects people to increase visibility for Free software projects and foster collaborations. The free software movement has been extensively analyzed using economic methodologies, including perspectives from heterodox economics . Of particular interest to economists
1674-706: The GNU GPL as "viral". These licensing terms can only be enforced through asserting copyrights. Critics of copyleft licensing challenge the idea that restricting modifications is in line with the free software movement's emphasis on various "freedoms", especially when alternatives like MIT , BSD , and Apache licenses are more permissive. Proponents enjoy the assurance that copylefted work cannot usually be incorporated into non-free software projects. They emphasize that copyleft licenses may not attach for all uses and that in any case, developers can simply choose not to use copyleft-licensed software. FLOSS license proliferation
1736-506: The Unix operating system. It had a comprehensive, hand-crafted knowledge base of its domain, and it aimed at phrasing the answer to accommodate various types of users. Another project was LILOG, a text-understanding system that operated on the domain of tourism information in a German city. The systems developed in the UC and LILOG projects never went past the stage of simple demonstrations, but they helped
1798-421: The domain adaptation of the underlying language models for industry use cases . Free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users , namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software ,
1860-431: The Free Software Movement and Open Source Initiative have taken place when it comes to practical projects. By 2005, Richard Glass considered the differences to be a "serious fracture" but "vitally important to those on both sides of the fracture" and "of little importance to anyone else studying the movement from a software engineering perspective" since they have had "little effect on the field". Eric Raymond criticises
1922-464: The Internet. Gabriella Coleman has emphasized the importance of accreditation, respect, and honour within the free software community as a form of compensation for contributions to projects, over and against financial motivations. The Swedish Marxian economist Johan Söderberg has argued that the free software movement represents a complete alternative to capitalism that may be expanded to create
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1984-582: The United States, there have been efforts to pass legislation at the state level encouraging the use of free software by state government agencies. On January 11, 2022, two bills were shown on the New Hampshire legislating floor. The first bill called "HB 1273" was introduced by Democratic New Hampshire representative Eric Gallager, the bill prioritized "replacing proprietary software used by state agencies with free software." Gallager stated that to an extent,
2046-1033: The Wolfram Integration for Siri was changed in June 2013 to use Bing to query certain results on IOS 7. Starting IOS 17, several users would report that Wolfram for Siri would no longer answer mathematical equations, instead fully defaulting on web search queries with no notable explanation. WolframAlpha data types , sets of curated information and formulas that assist in creating, categorization, and filling of spreadsheet information, became available in July 2020 within Microsoft Excel . The Microsoft-Wolfram partnership ended nearly two years later, in 2022, in favor of Microsoft Power Query data types. WolframAlpha functionality in Microsoft Excel ended in June 2023. Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on May 15, 2009, at 7 p.m. CDT and were broadcast live on Justin.tv . The plan
2108-476: The answer type. In the example above, the subject is "Chinese National Day", the predicate is "is" and the adverbial modifier is "when", therefore the answer type is "Date". Unfortunately, some interrogative words like "Which", "What", or "How" do not correspond to unambiguous answer types: Each can represent more than one type. In situations like this, other words in the question need to be considered. A lexical dictionary such as WordNet can be used for understanding
2170-424: The attention of Microsoft , Peru, whose general manager wrote a letter to Villanueva. His response received worldwide attention and is seen as a classic piece of argumentation favouring use of free software in governments. Uruguay has a sanctioned law requiring that the state give priority to free software. It also requires that information be exchanged in open formats . The Government of Venezuela implemented
2232-482: The belief that it is immoral to prohibit or prevent people from exercising these freedoms, and that they are required in creating a community where software users can help each other and have control over their technology. Regarding proprietary software , some believe that it is not strictly immoral, citing increased profitability in the business models available for proprietary software, along with technical features and convenience. The Free Software Foundation espouses
2294-419: The candidate—the more and the closer the better. The answer is then translated by parsing into a compact and meaningful representation. In the previous example, the expected output answer is "1st Oct." An open-source, math-aware, question answering system called MathQA , based on Ask Platypus and Wikidata , was published in 2018. MathQA takes an English or Hindi natural language question as input and returns
2356-577: The content of audio, images, and video. Current question answering research topics include: In 2011, Watson , a question answering computer system developed by IBM , competed in two exhibition matches of Jeopardy! against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings , winning by a significant margin. Facebook Research made their DrQA system available under an open source license . This system uses Misplaced Pages as knowledge source. The open source framework Haystack by deepset combines open-domain question answering with generative question answering and supports
2418-413: The context. Once the system identifies the question type, it uses an information retrieval system to find a set of documents that contain the correct keywords. A tagger and NP/Verb Group chunker can verify whether the correct entities and relations are mentioned in the found documents. For questions such as "Who" or "Where", a named-entity recogniser finds relevant "Person" and "Location" names from
2480-422: The correct answer type. Keyword extraction is the first step in identifying the input question type. In some cases, words clearly indicate the question type, e.g., "Who", "Where", "When", or "How many"—these words might suggest to the system that the answers should be of type "Person", "Location", "Date", or "Number", respectively. POS (part-of-speech) tagging and syntactic parsing techniques can also determine
2542-561: The development of theories on computational linguistics and reasoning. Specialized natural-language question answering systems have been developed, such as EAGLi for health and life scientists. QA systems are used in a variety of applications, including As of 2001 , question-answering systems typically included a question classifier module that determined the type of question and the type of answer. Different types of question-answering systems employ different architectures. For example, modern open-domain question answering systems may use
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2604-613: The domain of mathematics, which involves formula language, the goal is to later extend the task to other domains (e.g., STEM disciplines, such as chemistry, biology, etc.), which employ other types of special notation (e.g., chemical formulae). The inverse of mathematical question answering—mathematical question generation—has also been researched. The PhysWikiQuiz physics question generation and test engine retrieves mathematical formulae from Wikidata together with semantic information about their constituting identifiers (names and values of variables). The formulae are then rearranged to generate
2666-731: The existence of FOSS in China has been important in challenging the presence of Microsoft , which Guangnan Ni, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated, "The monopoly of (Microsoft Windows) is even more powerful in China than other places in the world". Yi Zhou, a professor of mathematics at Fudan University , has also alleged that, "Government procurement of FLOSS for a number of years in China has compelled Microsoft to cut its prices of Office software substantially" Government of India had issued Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India in 2015 to drive uptake within
2728-428: The following years. The common feature of all these systems is that they had a core database or knowledge system that was hand-written by experts of the chosen domain. The language abilities of BASEBALL and LUNAR used techniques similar to ELIZA and DOCTOR , the first chatterbot programs. SHRDLU was a successful question-answering program developed by Terry Winograd in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It simulated
2790-493: The free software movement, with the main conflicts centered around the organization's needs for compromise and pragmatism rather than adhering to founding values and philosophies. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in February 1998 by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens to promote the term " open-source software " as an alternative term for free software . The OSI aimed to address the perceived shortcomings and ambiguity of
2852-443: The freedoms of free software. According to Stallman, "The only thing in the software field that is worse than an unauthorised copy of a proprietary program, is an authorised copy of the proprietary program because this does the same harm to its whole community of users, and in addition, usually the developer, the perpetrator of this evil, profits from it." Some supporters of the free software movement take up public speaking , or host
2914-538: The government. With the vision to transform India as a Software Product Nation, National Policy on Software Products-2019 was approved by the Government. Free and Open Source Software (Foss) is crucial for countries such as Pakistan which is set up by Union of Information Technology. For the case of Pakistan, Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) aids in the creation and advocate of FOSS usage in various government departments in addition to curbing illegality of copying that
2976-857: The operation of a robot in a toy world (the "blocks world"), and it offered the possibility of asking the robot questions about the state of the world. The strength of this system was the choice of a very specific domain and a very simple world with rules of physics that were easy to encode in a computer program. In the 1970s, knowledge bases were developed that targeted narrower domains of knowledge. The question answering systems developed to interface with these expert systems produced more repeatable and valid responses to questions within an area of knowledge. These expert systems closely resembled modern question answering systems except in their internal architecture. Expert systems rely heavily on expert-constructed and organized knowledge bases , whereas many modern question answering systems rely on statistical processing of
3038-432: The potential implications of giving an automated website proprietary rights to the data it generates. Free software advocate Richard Stallman also opposes recognizing the site as a copyright holder and suspects that Wolfram Research would not be able to make this case under existing copyright law. Answer engine A question-answering implementation, usually a computer program, may construct its answers by querying
3100-511: The principle that all software needs free documentation, as programmers should have the ability to update manuals to reflect modifications made to the software. Within the movement, the FLOSS Manuals foundation specializes in providing such documentation. The core work of the free software movement is focused on software development. The free software movement also rejects proprietary software, refusing to install software that does not give them
3162-420: The proposed legislation will help distinguish "free software" and "open-source software", this will also put these two into state regulation. The second bill called "HB 1581" was proposed by Grafton Republican representative Lex Berezhny. The bill would've restored a requisite forcing "state agencies to use proprietary software" and as Lex put it, "when it is the most effective solution." He also said that requisite
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#17328913286343224-528: The rejection of proprietary software and the promotion of free software . Stallman notes that this action would not hinder the progression of technology, as he states, "Wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art." Members of the Free Software Movement believe that all software users should have the freedoms listed in The Free Software Definition . Members hold
3286-434: The retrieved documents. Only the relevant paragraphs are selected for ranking. A vector space model can classify the candidate answers. Check if the answer is of the correct type as determined in the question type analysis stage. An inference technique can validate the candidate answers. A score is then given to each of these candidates according to the number of question words it contains and how close these words are to
3348-513: The service by launching an iOS application with a cost of $ 50, while the website itself was free. That plan was abandoned after criticism. On February 8, 2012, WolframAlpha Pro was released, offering users additional features for a monthly subscription fee. Some high-school and college students use WolframAlpha to cheat on math homework, though Wolfram Research says the service helps students understand math with its problem-solving capabilities. InfoWorld published an article warning readers of
3410-430: The speed at which the free software movement is progressing, suggesting that temporary compromises should be made for long-term gains. Raymond argues that this could raise awareness of the software and thus increase the free software movement's influence on relevant standards and legislation. Richard Stallman, on the other hand, sees the current level of compromise as a greater cause for worry. Stallman said that this
3472-440: The term "free software", as well as shifting the focus of free software from a social and ethical issue to instead emphasize open source as a superior model for software development. The latter became the view of Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds , while Bruce Perens argued that open source was meant to popularize free software under a new brand and called for a return to basic ethical principles. Some free software advocates use
3534-411: The terms " Free and Open-Source Software " (FOSS) or "Free/Libre and Open-Source Software" (FLOSS) as a form of inclusive compromise, which brings free and open-source software advocates together to work on projects cohesively. Some users believe this is an ideal solution in order to promote both the user's freedom with the software and the pragmatic efficiency of an open-source development model. This view
3596-860: The use of free software by government agencies and government-funded projects. In June 1997, the Society for Study, Application, and Development of Free Software was established under the China Software Industry Association in Beijing. Through this organization, the website freesoft.cei.gov.cn was developed, though the website is currently inaccessible on IP addresses located in the United States. The use of open-source software Linux in China has moved beyond government and educational institutions and has extended to other organizations such as financial institutions, telecommunications, and public security. Several Chinese researchers and scholars have claimed that
3658-452: The user's question. The returned answer is in the form of short texts rather than a list of relevant documents. The system finds answers by using a combination of techniques from computational linguistics , information retrieval , and knowledge representation . The system takes a natural language question as an input rather than a set of keywords, for example: "When is the national day of China?" It then transforms this input sentence into
3720-509: Was extended to answer 15 math question types. MathQA methods need to combine natural and formula language. One possible approach is to perform supervised annotation via Entity Linking . The "ARQMath Task" at CLEF 2020 was launched to address the problem of linking newly posted questions from the platform Math Stack Exchange to existing ones that were already answered by the community. Providing hyperlinks to already answered, semantically related questions helps users to get answers earlier but
3782-631: Was happening between 2012 and 2018. According to the Concord Monitor, the state of New Hampshire had an already "thriving open source software community" with a view of "live free or die" but they had difficulty getting that notion with the state. Congressmen Edgar David Villanueva and Jacques Rodrich Ackerman have been instrumental in introducing free software in Peru , with bill 1609 on "Free Software in Public Administration". The incident invited
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#17328913286343844-404: Was to publicly launch the service a few hours later. However, there were issues due to extreme load. The service officially launched on May 18, 2009, receiving mixed reviews. In 2009, WolframAlpha advocates pointed to its potential , some stating that how it determines results is more important than current usefulness. WolframAlpha was free at launch, but later Wolfram Research attempted to monetize
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