What is Question Answering? QA describes systems which answer questions posed in natural language. For example, "Who is the Prime Minister of Australia?" would be answered with "John Howard". What is a Segmenter? A segmenter is used as part of the QA process. After the system has searched for documents containing keywords from the question (such as "Prime", "Minister", "Australia"), the segmenter is responsible for 'segmenting' each document and returning the highest ranked segment. Segments are groups of sentences, and they are ranked based on their relevancy to the question. Basic ranks (such as the proportion of words contained from the question) are used as well as more complex ones (matching Part of Speech tags, matching Named Entity tags with the Question type and so on). Explain this Segmenter This segmenter was produced for use with a Question Answering system built at the University of Sydney. It is written in Python and uses an extensive yet simple object structure. It has also been optimised for speed (as much as any Python program can reasonably be). Downloads? Licence? Contact? To download the source click here. The source code is in the public domain and may be used in any way you see fit. It would be nice if you told me about any uses of it, however. To contact me, email my source forge address: willcannings@users.sourceforge.net.