While finding the web pages that contain the desired information is an important first step, what an information seeker needs is often an answer to a question.
given a question, we want a system to return the exact answers to the question, and not just the documents to allow us to further search for the The need for question answering (QA) systems has prompted the initiation of the question answering track in TREC-8 (Voorhees and Tice, 2000) to address this problem.