The START question answering system pulls information from various sources to answer users’ natural language questions. One such source is Wikipedia. Unlike a traditional search engine it returns a concise response that directly answers the question as opposed to a list of links that the user must manually sift through. My SuperUROP project focuses on extracting information from Wikipedia in such a way that it can be efficiently and accurately matched with user-generated questions. It will build on work I have done throughout this past year.

As a computer science major minoring in linguistics my project spans two of my main areas of interest. I have already done related work in the same lab and view this project as a natural extension of my current research. The SuperUROP program is the perfect opportunity to not only work on this project but also engage with and present to others in a way that goes beyond the reach of a normal UROP.