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<Paper uid="N04-1008">
  <Title>Automatic Question Answering: Beyond the Factoid</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="11" end_page="11" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Previous work on question answering has focused almost exclusively on building systems for handling factoid questions. These systems have recently achieved impressive performance (Moldovan et al., 2002). The world beyond the factoid questions, however, is largely unexplored, with few notable exceptions (Berger et al., 2001; Agichtein et al., 2002; Girju 2003). The present paper attempts to explore the portion related to answering FAQ-like questions, without restricting the domain or type of the questions to be handled, or restricting the type of answers to be provided. While we still have a long way to go in order to achieve robust non-factoid QA, this work is a step in a direction that goes beyond restricted questions and answers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We consider the present QA system as a baseline on which more finely tuned QA architectures can be built.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Learning from the experience of factoid question answering, one of the most important features to be added is a question typology for the FAQ domain. Efforts towards handling specific question types, such as causal questions, are already under way (Girju 2003). A carefully devised typology, correlated with a systematic approach to fine tuning, seem to be the lessons for success in answering both factoid and beyond factoid questions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>