START natural language system

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START, is the world's first Web-based question answering system, has been on-line and continuously operating since December, 1993. It has been developed by Boris Katz and his associates of the InfoLab Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Unlike information retrieval systems such as search engines, START aims to supply users with "just the right information," instead of merely providing a list of hits. Currently, the system can answer millions of English questions about places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.