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Lexxe's Affirmative Question Answering - A World First
Date: October 30th, 2006
Lexxe will introduce Affirmative Question Answering to the users as part of its search engine query format, a world first of its kind, as of today.
According to English grammar, "Affirmative Questions" are those questions that can be answered with a "Yes" or "No". Although "I am not sure" is applicable to answing all questions and this is no exception for Affirmative Questions, "Yes" or "No" is still the main way to answer Affirmative Answers. Therefore, Affiramative Questions are also defined as those questions expecting "Yes" or "No" answers.
For example, one can ask Lexxe,
"Does a fly have six legs?",
"Did Bill Gates marry Melinda French?",
"Has the climate changed?",
"Was Einstein a Nobel Laureate?",
"Is Yaounde the capital of Uganda?" and
"Will Paris host the 2012 Olympic Games?", etc.
Affirmative Question Answering offers a very useful tool for users to verify ideas using a search engine. It saves users the time and effort in verifying the facts by browing the snippets or the web pages linked to the search results. Again, Lexxe demonstrates a higher intelligence (natural language query understanding ability and textual language processing ability) in the 3rd generation Internet search engine enabled by its advanced Natural Language technology. In addition to the general open interrogative question types allowed in Lexxe, this is the first time in the world that a search engine is able to answer a "Yes" or "No" questions, to the best of our knowledge.
Some requirements do apply to Lexxe's Affirmative Questions Answering. For example, questions need to be brief and short (ideally under 10 words), and also common words are preferred over less common ones.
Like the processing of general interrogative questions (those begin with Who, What, When, etc.), Affirmative Question Answering also requires syntactic parsing, question to statement conversion and other linguistic processing to fulfil the task of verifying the statement derived from the question before eventually deciding on yielding a "Yes" or "No" answer.
Internal tests showed that Lexxe's Affirmative Question Answering accuracy rate is about 85%.
Lexxe Search Engine offers Affirmative Question Answering at this early stage in order to further test and improve its ability to answer Affirmative Questions with practical queries from users. We welcome users to try out this new feature and offer us valuable feedback (please send email to contact[AT]lexxe.com).
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