In December 1993, the START system became the first natural language system to be made available for question answering to the users of the World Wide Web. The first release of the START knowledge base contained information about faculty members of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and their research. Since then START has been involved in dialogs with users all over the world answering hundreds of thousands of questions. In response to these questions and in response to our sponsors' priorities, we expanded the original knowledge base and added new knowledge bases.
Currently, the users of various START servers get answers to natural language questions about geography and climate of certain countries, get access to weather forecasts for major cities, distances between cities, maps of numerous countries and their capitals. Separately, we created a knowledge base with topical information on nuclear technology and nuclear proliferation. Another knowledge base, the Bosnia Information Server, provides access to multimedia information on the U.S. mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It answers questions about the geography and climate of the Bosnian region, about recent military events in the region, and about the history of Bosnian conflict.
As we added more and more information to START's knowledge base, we discovered the advantages of ``virtual collaboration.'' We realized that it is the existence of the Web with its huge resources that allows us to put to use the fruits of labor of a large group of people without explicitly collaborating with them. At any given time, in response to a question, START dispatches a user either to one of several weather Web pages, or to one of the map collections, a CIA database, personal homepage, a popular search engine. It is from this ``virtual collaboration'' that START receives its additional power.
The following sample questions taken from START's log files help illustrate the range of questions asked by the WWW users.