Introduction to the Special Issue on Question Answering

This special issue issue of AI Magazine presents six articles on some of the most interesting question-answering systems in development today. Included are articles on Vulcan's Project Halo, Cyc's Semantic Research Assistant, IBM's Watson, True Knowledge, and the University of Washington's TextRunner. Even though AI has diversified much beyond the notion of intelligent behavior proposed in the Turing test, QA remains a fundamental capability needed by a large class of systems. The QA problem extends beyond AI systems to many analytical tasks that involve gathering, correlating, and analyzing information in ways that can naturally be formulated as questions. Ultimately, questions are an interface to systems that provide such analytic capabilities, and the need to provide this interface has increased dramatically over the past decade with the explosion of information available in digital form.