LogAnswer in Question Answering Forums

LogAnswer is a question answering (QA) system for the German language. By providing concise answers to questions of the user, LogAnswer provides more natural access to document collections than conventional search engines do. QA forums provide online venues where human users can ask each other questions and give answers. We describe an ongoing adaptation of LogAnswer to QA forums, aiming at creating a virtual forum user who can respond intelligently and efficiently to human questions. This serves not only as a more accurate evaluation method of our system, but also as a real world use case for automated QA. The basic idea is that the QA system can disburden the human experts from answering routine questions, e.g. questions with known answer in the forum, or questions that can be answered from the Wikipedia. As a result, the users can focus on those questions that really demand human judgement or expertise. In order not to spam users, the QA system needs a good self-assessment of its answer quality. Existing QA techniques, however, are not sufficiently precision-oriented. The need to provide justified answers thus fosters research into logic-oriented QA and novel methods for answer validation.