Our Question-Answering Technology makes it easy to receive direct, relevant answers to your questions. We do not rely on canned questions and/or answers, and we do not just match some keywords. We understand the questions and help answer them. Casual questioneers who ask simple factual questions; employees who need quick answers on company procedures or benefits; consumers who look for specific product features or prices; research analysts who collect specific information about the market; children doing research for homework; will all benefit from free, open searches. Our technology transforms the standard search from a merely finding tool into an answer provider, all in the context of a natural, simple and straightforward process.

LCC's Question-Answering Technology has been developed over the past 10 years by our team of renowned researchers. For the past 6 years, we won, by wide margins, the Text Retrieval Conference's competition as the top preforming Question Answering System. TREC, an international competition with between 70 and 90 participants each year:

• NIST-sponsored TREC 13 QA, 2004 - the best performing question answering system
• NIST-sponsored TREC 12 QA, 2003 - the best performing question answering system
• NIST-sponsored TREC 11 QA, 2002 - the best performing question answering system
• NIST-sponsored TREC 10 QA, 2001 - the best performing system in two out of three tasks
• NIST-sponsored TREC 9 QA, 2000 - the best performing question answering system
• NIST-sponsored TREC 8 QA, 1999 - the top performing question answering system

Our prominent position in Question Answering has been awarded with significant research contracts for further technology development. Open-domain Question Answering is a complex task that encompasses many natural language processing, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence techniques. The inherent difficulties in finding answers to open-domain questions pose serious technical challenges, and, as our awards history shows, we not only identified these challenges, but we were also recognized for solving them in the best way. Furthermore, we added extended support for a wide range of content formats, dynamic and automatic indexing, and real time automated system management and reporting. The result is our PowerAnswer technology that not only makes looking for information natural, successful and expeditious, but also disseminates fresh information in a fast, efficient and cost-effective/inexpensive way. Both companies and their inside and/or outside questioners (e.g. employees, customers, analysts) benefit from the power to answer.