Question answering (QA) has been the subject of a resurgence over the past years. The said resurgence has led to a multitude of question answering (QA) systems being developed both by companies and research facilities. While a few components of QA systems get reused across implementations, most systems do not leverage the full potential of component reuse. Hence, the development of QA systems is currently still a tedious and time-consuming process. We address the challenge of accelerating the creation of novel or tailored QA systems by presenting a concept for a self-wiring approach to composing QA systems. Our approach will allow the reuse of existing, web-based QA systems or modules while developing new QA platforms. To this end, it will rely on QA modules being described using the Web Ontology Language. Based on these descriptions, our approach will be able to automatically compose QA systems using a data-driven approach automatically.
Software frameworks which support integration and scaling of text analysis algorithms make it possible to build complex, high performance information systems for information extraction, information retrieval, and question answering; IBM's Watson is a prominent example. As the complexity and scaling of information systems become ever greater, it is much more challenging to effectively and efficiently determine which toolkits, algorithms, knowledge bases or other resources should be integrated into an information system in order to achieve a desired or optimal level of performance on a given task. This paper presents a formal representation of the space of possible system configurations, given a set of information processing components and their parameters (configuration space) and discusses algorithmic approaches to determine the optimal configuration within a given configuration space (configuration space exploration or CSE). We introduce the CSE framework, an extension to the UIMA framework which provides a general distributed solution for building and exploring configuration spaces for information systems. The CSE framework was used to implement biomedical information systems in case studies involving over a trillion different configuration combinations of components and parameter values operating on question answering tasks from the TREC Genomics. The framework automatically and efficiently evaluated different system configurations, and identified configurations that achieved better results than prior published results.