[ntcir:273] OpenEphyra open source QA system released

[Eric Nyberg <ehn+@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear NTCIR Friends,

My apologies in advance if you've already received this message from the
CLEF or TREC mailing lists. I am forwarding an announcement about a new
question answering system which is being released into open source from
CMU; the introductory letter below is from one of my graduate students,
Nico Schlaefer, who is heading up the project. If you have any
questions, please feel free to ask either Nico or myself.

Best,

Eric Nyberg, Professor
Language Technologies Institute
Carnegie Mellon University



Dear Colleagues,

The question answering research group at CMU has decided to place the
Ephyra QA system into open source. The open source version -
OpenEphyra - is almost identical to the system that has been
evaluated in the QA track at TREC, except that we had to exclude some
3rd party tools and code with specific hardware requirements. The
result is a system that is platform-independent, easy to use, and
that can be run on a standard desktop computer.

We invite you to download OpenEphyra and try it out for your own
research. By making our code open, we hope to facilitate evaluations
and comparisons of different approaches by providing a common
platform for experiments. In addition, we would like to give
researchers the opportunity to develop new algorithms for QA
processing steps without having to build an entire end-to-end system
first. It is our hope that OpenEphyra will also be used for
educational purposes; it could easily be adapted for computer science
course projects on NLP applications.

If you are interested in trying it out, you can download OpenEphyra
from SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openephyra/
Just unzip it and run one of the scripts.

Additional information about the project, the documentation and a
collection of tutorials can be found here:
http://www.ephyra.info/

Also, we have created a mailing list on which we will announce future
releases and news about OpenEphyra:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openephyra-announce/
This is a low-traffic list.

Finally, we would like to invite you to get involved in this open QA
project. We highly encourage you to extend the system with your own
work, and to share your improvements with us and the QA community.
Please get in touch with us if you are interested in joining this
project, or if you have any comments or questions!

Best regards,

Nico Schlaefer
PhD candidate
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University