Research And Realization Of Chinese-based Question Understanding System--Question Understanding Sub-system Of Virtual Information Consultant System

VIC is a virtual agent, which can produce a processed answer of user's question from information resource. The system is an effective solution for surf in today's information explosion.The VIC system consists of five sub-systems: Question analyzer, Search engine, Document processing, Answer extraction. Author's task is researching into the first sub-system, the Question Understanding sub-system. In this paper, we first analyze the actuality of information exploded. Then, we summarize the development of information search and search engine and present the applied value of the natural language processing (NLP), an important branch of the computational linguistics. Afterwards, the necessity and aim of our research will be described. Finally we will present the meaning of the VIC system and identify our tasks.Though the NLP is hotly studied by the international academia currently, which mainly related to our task are QA and Virtual Reference Service System. There are not any system wholly for Chinese question analysis now. The system that can provide network service, with functions of question analysis, document processing and answer extraction all together, is especially scarce. So, we present the model of the VIC system based on the use of the search engine. Then, we put forward the model of the question understanding sub-system borrowed the idea of Chinese question analysis of computational linguistics.Finally, we deeply explore the question understanding sub-system by three steps, the theory analysis, actually application and program simulation. Our results indicate the rationality and reliability of the theories in this paper, and validate the feasibility of the methods. They also make clear that NLP has broadly applied foreground.