Interactive Question Answering

The increasing amount of information available online has led to the development of technologies that help to deal with it. One of them is Interactive Question Answering (IQA), a research field that has emerged at the intersection of question answering and dialogue systems, and which allows users to find the answers to questions in an interactive way. During the answering process, the automatic system can initiate a dialogue with the user in order to clarify missing or ambiguous information, or suggest further topics for discussion. This chapter presents the state-of-the-art in the field of interactive question answering. Given that IQA inherits a lot of features from dialogue systems and question answering, these fields are also briefly presented. Analysis of the existing systems reveals that in general IQA systems rely on a scaled-down version of a dialogue system, sometimes built on top of question answering systems. Evaluation of IQA is also discussed, showing that it combines evaluation techniques from question answering and dialogue systems.