Advanced Question-Answering for Intelligence (AQUAINT)

Project Description

Researchers the world over are exploring next-generation search techniques called question answering (Q-A) to enable users to ask questions in natural language and receive precise answers. In 2003, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) launched the AQUAINT Program to develop these Q-A technologies.

Accomplishments

In support of the AQUAINT Program, we performed two broad tasks in collaboration with the Interactive Systems Section at the Naval Research Laboratory. First, we performed an extensive human-subject study of the advantages and disadvantages of Q-A systems compared to traditional keyword search systems. Second, we developed a secure and configurable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) called Intelligent Question-Answering (INQA) which integrates three state-of-the-art Q-A systems. INQA is a Q-A service broker and an application server that provides a rich, intuitive web-based interface for end users to perform intelligence analysis. It also supports a wide variety of performance evaluation metrics used in our human-subject study. INQA was demonstrated to the United States Congress at at the 2008 ODNI Tech Expo.