mini_qa is a toy question-answering program originally written by Michael Nielsen. It uses Google to attempt to answer questions of the form "Who... ?".
An example question is: "Who discovered relativity?"
The design is inspired by the AskMSR system developed by researchers at Microsoft Research. The original paper is:
Brill, Lin, Banko, Dumais and Ng, "Data-Intensive Question Answering" (2001).
The original author of this program, Michael Nielsen, described background to this program here and here.
The present fork of mini_qa was created by Marco Kuhlmann for use in a course at Linköping University called Perspectives on information technology.
Clone the repository and run the script:
% python mini_qa.py
(This assumes that python points to Python 3.)
MIT License
Except the files google.py all files in this
repository are copyright (c) 2012 Michael Nielsen
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.