{
  "altLabels": [
    "QA",
    "Question-Answering"
  ],
  "definition": "A task in which a system returns an answer, answer-bearing snippet, or response to a natural-language question rather than only a ranked list of documents.",
  "derivedRelations": [
    {
      "note": "Question answering returns an answer to a question; deep research often produces a synthesized, cited research result after multiple search and reasoning steps.",
      "target": "deep-research",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "FiQA-2018 is a dataset used for financial QA/retrieval evaluation; question answering is the task.",
      "target": "fiqa-2018",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "HotpotQA is a dataset; question answering is the task.",
      "target": "hotpotqa",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "Natural Questions is a dataset; question answering is the task.",
      "target": "natural-questions",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "Tip-of-the-tongue search identifies an item from partial clues; question answering returns an answer or answer-bearing response.",
      "target": "tip-of-the-tongue-search",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "target": "deep-research",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "fiqa-2018",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "hotpotqa",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "multi-hop-retrieval",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "natural-questions",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "ntcir",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "query-decomposition",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "tip-of-the-tongue-search",
      "type": "related"
    }
  ],
  "distinctions": [
    {
      "reason": "Question answering aims to return an answer or answer-bearing response; document retrieval returns documents for a query or information need.",
      "statement": "Question Answering is not Document Retrieval.",
      "target": "document-retrieval",
      "targetLabel": "Document Retrieval",
      "targetUri": "https://id.searchplex.net/document-retrieval/"
    },
    {
      "reason": "Question answering is a task objective; grounding concerns whether an answer or generated response is supported by source material.",
      "statement": "Question Answering is not Grounding.",
      "target": "grounding",
      "targetLabel": "Grounding",
      "targetUri": "https://id.searchplex.net/grounding/"
    },
    {
      "reason": "Question answering is a task; RAG is a retrieval-augmented generation pattern that can be used for question answering and other tasks.",
      "statement": "Question Answering is not Retrieval-Augmented Generation.",
      "target": "rag",
      "targetLabel": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation",
      "targetUri": "https://id.searchplex.net/rag/"
    }
  ],
  "id": "question-answering",
  "kind": "Task",
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/",
  "links": [
    {
      "label": "TREC Question Answering Data",
      "type": "officialHomepage",
      "url": "https://trec.nist.gov/data/qa.html"
    }
  ],
  "modifiedAt": "2026-09-14T06:43:46Z",
  "prefLabel": "Question Answering",
  "publisher": {
    "name": "Searchplex",
    "url": "https://searchplex.net/"
  },
  "relations": [
    {
      "target": "retrieval",
      "type": "broader"
    },
    {
      "note": "Question answering aims to return an answer or answer-bearing response; document retrieval returns documents for a query or information need.",
      "target": "document-retrieval",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "Question answering is a task objective; grounding concerns whether an answer or generated response is supported by source material.",
      "target": "grounding",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "note": "Question answering is a task; RAG is a retrieval-augmented generation pattern that can be used for question answering and other tasks.",
      "target": "rag",
      "type": "notEquivalentTo"
    },
    {
      "target": "clef",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "grounding",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "passage-retrieval",
      "type": "related"
    },
    {
      "target": "rag",
      "type": "related"
    }
  ],
  "representations": {
    "html": "https://id.searchplex.net/question-answering/",
    "json": "https://id.searchplex.net/question-answering.json",
    "jsonld": "https://id.searchplex.net/question-answering.jsonld"
  },
  "scheme": "https://id.searchplex.net/scheme/",
  "scopeNote": "Question answering may use retrieval internally, especially in open-domain QA and RAG systems, but the task objective is answer production. TREC question-answering evaluations historically emphasized returning short answers or snippets for fact-based questions.",
  "status": "published",
  "terms": [
    {
      "community": "industry",
      "label": "Answer Search",
      "usage": "nearSynonym"
    },
    {
      "community": "ml-nlp",
      "label": "Answer Generation",
      "usage": "nearSynonym"
    }
  ],
  "uri": "https://id.searchplex.net/question-answering/"
}