Software Details
| Title: | OpenEphyra open source question answering system |
|---|---|
| Submitter: | Nico Schlaefer |
| Description: | Dear Colleagues, The question answering (QA) research group at Carnegie Mellon University has decided to place the Ephyra QA system into open source. Ephyra retrieves answers to natural language questions from the Web and other sources. The open source version - OpenEphyra - is almost identical to the system that has been evaluated in the TREC question answering track (http://trec.nist.gov/), except that we had to exclude some 3rd party tools and code with specific hardware requirements. The result is a system that is platform-independent, easy to use, and that can be run on a standard desktop computer and evaluated on questions from the TREC 8-15 evaluations. (Thanks to NIST for allowing us to redistribute the test sets.) We invite you to download OpenEphyra and try it out for your own research. By making our code open, we hope to facilitate evaluations and comparisons of different approaches by providing a common platform for experiments. In addition, we would like to give researchers the opportunity to develop new algorithms for QA processing steps without having to build an entire end-to-end system first. It is our hope that OpenEphyra will also be used for educational purposes; it could easily be adapted for course projects on natural language processing applications. If you are interested in trying it out, you can download OpenEphyra from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openephyra/ Just unzip it, run one of the scripts, and type in your questions. Additional information about the project, the documentation and a collection of tutorials can be found here: http://www.ephyra.info/ Also, we have created a mailing list on which we will announce future releases and news about OpenEphyra: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openephyra-announce/ This is a low-traffic list. Finally, we would like to invite you to get involved in this open QA project. We highly encourage you to extend the system with your own work, and to share your improvements with us and the QA community. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in joining this project, or if you have any comments or questions! Best regards, Nico Schlaefer PhD candidate School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 19.605 |
| Date Posted: | 21-Feb-2008 |
