Rapid engineering of QA systems using the light-weight qanary architecture

Establishing a Question Answering (QA) system is time consuming. One main reason is the involved fields, as solving a Question Answering task, i.e., answering a user's question with the correct fact(s), might require functionalities from different fields like information retrieval, natural language processing, and linked data. The architecture used for Qanary supports the derived need for easy collaboration on the level of QA processes. The focus of the design of Qanary was to enable rapid engineering of QA systems as same as a high flexibility of the component functionality. In this paper, we will present the engineering approach leading to re-usable components, high flexibility, and easy-to-compose QA systems.