Watsonsim: Overview of a Question Answering Engine

Abstract

The objective of the project is to design and run a system similar to Watson, designed to answer Jeopardy questions. In the course of a semester, we developed an open source question answering system using the Indri, Lucene, Bing and Google search engines, Apache UIMA, Open- and CoreNLP, and Weka among additional modules. By the end of the semester, we achieved 18% accuracy on Jeopardy questions, and work has not stopped since then.