[cyorir]

Along these lines, I worked on a team project in a university course to create an automated Q&A system making use of IBM Watson. We chose to focus on a Q&A system for business regulation in the state of Illinois. However, just using existing FAQs isn't sufficient. To build a corpus, we scraped several websites belonging to the state of Illinois for any information that would be relevant to businesses operating in Illinois. Then, we created sample question-answer pairs, with answers taken directly from the corpus. Using both the provided QA pairs and the rest of the unlabeled corpus, Watson trained a model to answer questions that hadn't been trained on by providing excerpts from the corpus. By ensuring that the model was providing excerpts from the corpus, we wouldn't have to worry that we were providing (too much) incorrect information; most of the time, the answers were relevant, too. Of course, you could create a similar system without using proprietary IBM software.