QuestionCube: A framework for question answering

QuestionCube is a framework for Question Answering (QA) that combines several techniques to retrieve passages containing the exact answers for natural language questions. It exploits: (a) Natural Language Processing algorithms for question and candidate answers analysis both in English and Italian; (b) Information Retrieval probabilistic models for candidate answers retrieval and (c) Machine Learning methods for question classification. The data source for the answer is an unstructured text document collection stored in search indices. In this paper an overview of the QuestionCube framework architecture is provided, together with a description of Wikiedi, a QA system for Wikipedia which exploits the proposed framework.