0-262-63304-3, $40.00, ￡25.95 Reviewed by.pdf

New Directions in Question Answering Mark T. Maybury (editor) (MITRE Corporation) Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004, xi+336 pp; paperbound, ISBN 0-262-63304-3, $40.00, £25.95 Reviewed by Marius Pa¸sca Google Inc. With goals as intuitive and desirable as they are challenging, the field of automated question answering has generated growing interest in the past few years. The increased momentum is apparent in the spread of research groups working on the topic, the number of relevant Ph.D. theses, papers that are now a common occurrence in the proceedings of top-rated conferences related to the topic, the scale of commercial en- deavors, and the steady financial commitments of various agencies to government- sponsored evaluations and research programs. The last of these constitutes the main justification of New Directions in Question Answering, a relatively recent contribution to the field. As shown in Table 1, the book suggests new milestones and directions of research which concurrently increase: the requirements imposed on the system (e.g., time-sensitive search and detection of obscure relations) (Chapter 2); scope (e.g., open or restricted application domains) (Chapter 6); complexity (e.g., fact-seeking vs. exploratory questions with opinion answers) (Chapter 7); the granularity of information sources (e.g., databases) (Chapter 9) versus unstructured text (Chapter 17) versus full-fledged knowledge bases (Chapter 19); generally, the expectations of the users of the system (e.g., regular users versus experts), including intelligence analysts. Even if considered in isolation rather than combined together, the majority of these goals are already very far reaching. Most readers will have an immediate intuition as to how difficult it would be