Sufficient consensus
Question answering returns a direct answer rather than a list of documents, extracting it from passages or generating it from retrieved material. It powers answer boxes, assistants and conversational search.
It is now the default for factual queries.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- It depends. Many real answers are conditional. The format has no room for the condition, so the condition is dropped.
- The source vanishes. Answers arrive without the context that would let a reader judge them, and often without a link at all.
- Questions nobody asked. The system answers what was typed. The more useful question is frequently the one the person did not know to ask.
- Disagreement flattened. Where credible sources differ, one version is selected and presented as settled.
- Publishing into a system that does not link back. Being the source of an answer that generates no visit is now a normal outcome and it changes what publishing is for.
What people actually want to know
- What does this answer depend on?
- Who says so, and what would change their mind?
- What should I have asked instead?
- If a machine answers for me, what does my page still do?
Write the condition next to the answer. A conditional answer survives being quoted. An unconditional one becomes wrong somewhere.
More in computational linguistics
Extractive summarizationThe summary is now the article for most of the audience.Keyphrase extractionIf your real subject is named once, it is not your subject as far as the system is concerned.Semantic searchThe engine got better at knowing what you meant.Named entity recognitionBeing an entity is a prerequisite for being understood.Topic modelingThe strongest finding in any corpus analysis is usually the subject that is missing.Word sense disambiguationYour page competes in whichever meaning the system assigned to it.Sentiment analysisA dashboard of positive and negative tells you the weather, not the cause.