We would like Qanda to be a community resource, especially for those researchers who are interested in aspects of question answering, but do not necessarily have the resources to build an entire end-to-end system. Our intent is to make it easy to swap components, e.g., add a new entity tagger, or use your own question analyzer.

We feel that the Catalyst architecture will enable this, as it permits a wide range of system topologies. Nonetheless, to the extent possible, we would like our components to work in standard XML pipelines (i.e., read XML from stdin, write additional XML to stdout).