How active is OAQA and is it currently possible to quickly obtain a running QA system?

[k0105]

Hi,

I'm confused about OAQA. On the one hand it seems to be very promising with its CMU and IBM background, but on the other hand the project seems largely inactive - quite a few subprojects are empty, documentation is lacking, baseqa only has 7.4 thousand LOC, helloqa even less than 1K, yet there has been a baseqa 2.0 release a few months ago. I'm currently trying to understand QA systems and would like to try OAQA, but I haven't been able to get it running so far and my question here: oaqa/helloqa#15 hasn't been answered, yet.

Hence:
a) How active is OAQA? [OpenHUB has no activity for baseqa, but lists helloqa as inactive.]

b) Is it possible to easily run a full QA system with OAQA (any subproject) or is it merely components that need to be assembled in a major development effort (like what baseqa seems to be)? What is the best way to see what OAQA has to offer?

c) Just like documentation in general, the OAQA-tutorial seems to be rudimentary / have holes. Besides that, it discusses annotators, which to me as a beginner seem very low-level. Can I assume that there is currently no finished QA system one could compile and submit questions to?

d) When trying to compile helloqa one is asked to provide Project Gutenberg data. What is it used for? Could I ask for book titles if the project worked? Does it rely on unstructured information only or is there also structured knowledge like WordNet used internally?

I'd really appreciate some answers to get started. Right now I feel a bit lost.

Thanks in advance.

Best wishes,
Joe

[noyessie]

I have the same problems.

[ziy]

@noyessie Please refer to the example biomedical instance from https://github.com/oaqa/bioasq, where you can find a package named baseqa (which should have been migrated to this project, but I didn't get a chance to do so) that contains the components and descriptors for general QA.

[noyessie]

thanks @ziy

Are there any place where we can found a good documentation. oaqa tutorial is too lazy and do not explains the features in baseqa , oaqa , cse , ecd.

[ziy]

@noyessie Thanks for your interest. This is a research project, and it has evolved very rapidly. I agree that that oaqa-tutorial is a bit out-dated and its focus is on how to create a simple QA system using the framework rather than describing all the major features of existing ones. For now, I might recommend to look at the two papers that I mentioned in the bioasq project, which has sections describing the ECD/BaseQA/BioASQ architecture.

[noyessie]

ok!!