UMD, UC Boulder Researchers Debut Computerized Question-Answering System

A team of students and researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder recently put their computerized question-answering system (QANTA) to the test for the first time in a quiz bowl-style demonstration in Chicago.

QANTA tied 200 to 200 against its human competitors in the match, which was hosted by the National Academic Quiz Tournaments. Unlike other question answering systems that are allowed to see the entire question at once (e.g., IBM Watson of “Jeopardy!” fame), QANTA decides when it has enough information to answer a question.

Four UMD students and Hal Daumé (left), professor of computer science and director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory in UMIACS, helped build QANTA. Before the competition, Jordan Boyd-Graber, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a former UMIACS member, described the state-of-the-art machine learning research that went into the system.

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