Question answering system for railway schedule

Master of Science in Computational Science 2013-2015 EXT T.K Manoj Kumar Radhika Mamidi ( Assistant professor) " International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad"

Using a computer to answer questions has been a human dream since the beginning of the digital era. A first step towards the achievement of such an ambitious goal is to deal with natural language to enable the computer to understand what its user asks. The discipline that studies the connection between natural language and the representation of its meaning via computational models is computational linguistics. According to such discipline, Question Answering can be defined as the task that, given a question formulated in natural language, aims at finding one or more concise answers. Here I am implementing question answering system in railway schedule. The system will handle seven types of queries. The domain will be the local train schedule in Trivandrum central railway station. This is a template based system. If we are giving a natural language question, the question run on the Stanford parser and extracting the key word from the parser and fill it in the template. Here the templates are from station, to station, via station, train name, train number, arrival time, departure time etc. If any template is missing it will form a query and run on the database and give the answer from database. The final output we get is in natural language.