Before a question can be answered by an advanced Question Answering (QA) system, it must be understood at several different levels. First, the complexity of the question needs to be identified based on a combination of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. Second, since questions are rarely asked in isolation, the question context needs to be determined for better understanding its request. Third, it is difficult to separate the question intentions from the question formulation, therefore plausible implications need to be coerced from each question. Fourth, mechanisms that either accept or reject the implied intentions are needed. All these different processes impact on the question understanding and implicitly on the accuracy of the returned answers.
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Harabagiu, S.M. (2008). Questions And Intentions. In: Strzalkowski, T., Harabagiu, S.M. (eds) Advances in Open Domain Question Answering. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4746-6_4
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