"Questions are asked and answered every day. Question answering
(QA) technology aims to deliver the same facility online. It
goes further than the more familiar search based on keywords (as
in Google, Yahoo, and other search engines), in attempting to
recognize what a question expresses and to respond with an
actual answer. This simplifies things for users in two ways.
First, questions do not often translate into a simple list of
keywords. ...Second, QA takes responsibility for providing
answers, rather than a searchable list of links to potentially
relevant documents (web pages), highlighted by snippets of text
that show how the query matched the documents." - from Bonnie
Webber & Nick Webb. Question Answering. The Handbook of
Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Edited by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox, Shalom Lappin. 2010,
Wiley.