A question answering system for project management applications

The usage of computer applications in the construction industry has steadily increased over the years, as has the complexity of many software applications. It is difficult for project personnel to become familiar with these ever-increasingly complex tools. Furthermore, the causes of many practical problems, such as project delays or escalating costs, are often not obvious from the outputs of these tools. A question answering system can potentially provide a means to directly extracting answers from these computer outputs. This paper examines various issues involved in building such a question answering system. In particular, emerging industry standards, such as ifcXML, are adopted as the knowledge representation format, and thus alleviate the manual effort to build a knowledge base. We explore the mechanisms of utilizing information in the knowledge base for question understanding. A prototype question answering system has been built and tested to illustrate the potential usefulness of such a system for project management applications.