Study And Implementation Of Agent-Based Intelligent Question-Answering System

With the development of information and network technology, there appears the third generation distance education, namely modern distance education, which is based on the modern information technology (computer technology, network technology and communication technology). Because the knowledge updates more quickly in the information society, modern distance education has developed rapidly and became a piece of beautiful scenery of the Chinese education. Question -Answering (QA) system, as an important part of teaching through the distance education, is indispensable in strengthening the communication between the teachers and the students and helping students find questions that they don't understand and get the answers that they really need. Now, in China QA systems are included in most distance education systems but they are poor in intelligence and interaction.Agent is a self-learning and environment-adaptive software entity. It has the characters of learning, knowledge, autonomy and cooperation. In order to improve the exsiting QA systems this article discusses a mutli-agent QA system that is based on the model of B/A/S and composed of the authentication agent, the group of student agent, the group of teacher agent, the group of administrator agent and the answer retrieval agent, which is instructed by the study theory of model constructing. This system is intelligent, self-learning and interactive. It provides a relaxed, free, real-time and convenient question answering platform for learners who study by distance education.This article first describes the background and present situation of distance education and QA system; points out the shortcomings of the existing QA systems which make us realize the direction of improvement. After that, it briefly discusses the study theory of model constructing and the theory and technology of agent. Then, the realization of the system is introduced from the three aspects of client, server and the choice of the development tools. Finally it summarizes the technologies and forecasts the prospects of the application of the agent-based intelligent question answering system.