The Ephyra Question Answering System

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Description

Ephyra is a modular and extensible framework for open domain question answering (QA). The system retrieves accurate answers to natural language questions from the Web and other sources. Ephyra has participated in the TREC evaluation and has been described in various scientific papers. The framework was developed by Nico Schlaefer at Universität Karlsruhe (TH) and later at Carnegie Mellon University, but many others have made valuable contributions over the past years. Special thanks go to (in no particular order):

Guido Sautter, for his work on definitional QA and the NE recognizer.
Jeongwoo Ko, who developed the Answer Generator (AG).
Justin Betteridge, who developed the answer type classifier.
Eric Nyberg, for his advice and for providing the environment for our QA research at CMU.
Petra Gieselmann, Thomas Schaaf, and Alex Waibel, for their support in the early phase of the Ephyra project.
Ephyra also contains some components that have been adopted from the JAVELIN system.

We are currently working on OpenEphyra, an open framework for question answering that we would like to share with the QA community. Our goal is to give researchers the opportunity to develop new QA techniques without worrying about the end-to-end system. We believe that OpenEphyra can facilitate evaluations and comparisons of different approaches by providing a common platform for experiments. We also hope that OpenEphyra will be used for educational purposes, such as for computer science course projects. Please take a look at the OpenEphyra page for more information about this project, or visit our SourceForge project site to download the latest release.