A comparative study of web based and IR based question answering systems

With the enormous growth of Web, users are able to find the information of his interest. Asking a question, a search engine returns a list of results in form of Web pages containing the required information. Then, the user needs to move through the result pages to find the answer. On the other hand, a Question answering system provides a set of answers to the user for his question i.e. when the user submits his question to a QA system, as the response he receives a precise answer or a set of answers that satisfies his request. The paper is a review of Web based and IR based QA systems.