In December 1993,
START
became the first natural language system
available for question answering on 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 can ask natural language questions about geography and climate of certain countries, 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 the existence of the Web with its huge resources allows us to put to use the fruits of labor of a large group of people without explicitly collaborating with them. Whenever we find a new Web site with an interesting database, we identify its directory structure and argument conventions. Then we create an S-rule (or an annotation schema) which, when triggered by an English question, invokes the appropriate URL (manufactured using arguments obtained from the question) and finally presents the information to the user. At any given time, in response to a question, START can dispatch a user to a weather Web page, a map collection, a CIA database, a personal homepage, a popular search engine. It is from this "virtual collaboration" that START receives its additional power.