S Geerthik. - Research Scholar, Computer Science,RIST University, India
S Venkatraman. - Research Scholar, Computer Science,RIST University, India
K Rajiv Gandhi - Kings College of Engineering,Bombay, India

This article provides the comparative overview of question answering (QA). We Classify the QA based on search engines, semantic web and also based on social networks. The working of QA in each class is given. In each class the approaches for QA is discussed in past ten years. This survey also provides an overall architecture for QA were the operations are spitted into three areas query processing, passage retrieval and answer processing. The different metrics used for measuring the performance of QA system is also discussed. We hope that this survey will be useful for addressing the problems in QA much better.

—QA, information retrieval, social network, semantic analysis