That is, they work as part of a pipeline, and either rely on the output of a previous IE step (Banko et al., 2007), or on direct human annotation (Bollacker et al., 2008) which tends to be costly and biased in coverage.
recent neural RC methods (Seo et al., 2017a;Shen et al., 2017) have demonstrated that end-to-end language understanding approaches can infer answers directly from text -sidestepping intermediate query parsing and IE steps.