Using Vector Space Model in Question Answering System

Question answering system is an information retrieval system in which the expected response givesdirectly the answer as requested rather than set of references which have possibilities as the answer. The objective of this research is to represent knowledge and retrieve the answer for a given question by utilizing Vector Space Model. While some mechanisms have been developed in question answering system such as N-gram, template-driven response, reversible transformation, etc., an attempt to use Vector Space Model is conducted. The query will be compared to the knowledge based by measuring their similarity. Data sample to test the model comes from 2 Ministers of Indonesia; they are The Minister of Education and Culture and The Minister of Tourism andCreative Economy Culture. In the experiment, 150 questions are given to the system. Each question words are given 25 questions. The experiment gives 0.662 of recall, 0.548 of precision, and 0.580 of F-measure. But unfortunately it needs around 29 seconds in average to give the answer to the users.