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<Paper uid="W04-0506">
  <Title>Cooperative Question Answering in Restricted Domains: the WEBCOOP Experiment</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="4" end_page="4" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion and Perspectives
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We reported in this paper an experiment for designing a logic based QA system, WEBCOOP, that integrates knowledge representation and advanced reasoning procedures to generate co-operative responses to natural language queries on the web. We claim that restricted domains are more suitable than open domains to conduct research in advanced techniques on QA because those systems require deeper modes of language understanding, more elaborated reasoning schemas paired with a variety of knowledge forms and sources.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> WEBCOOP is applied to the tourism domain, it is a challenging and rewarding experience because the tourism domain is half way between open domain applications and closed domains, allowing us to better perceive these two perspectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our corpus based approach allows to identify the type of knowledge associated with each cooperative function. The annotation of corpora constitutes, in our sense, a good evaluation method for the study of the portability of WEBOOP to other restricted domains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Finally, since an evaluation in TREC style is not relevant for our approach, we have: (1) the evaluation of the portability of the system w.r.t. the forms of knowledge involved and the applicability of inference schemas and (2) the evaluation of the linguistic and cognitive adequacy of the responses produced by the system. We are now evaluating the portability of generation templates to the health and education domains and the accuracy of cooperative functions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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