Research on Question Answering is focused mainly on classifying the question type and finding
the answer. Presenting the answer in a way that suits the user’s needs has received little
attention. This paper shows how existing question answering systems—which aim at finding
precise answers to questions—can be improved by exploiting summarization techniques to extract
more than just the answer from the document in which the answer resides. This is done
using a graph search algorithm which searches for relevant sentences in the discourse structure,
which is represented as a graph. The Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to create a
graph representation of a text document. The output is an extensive answer, which not only
answers the question, but also gives the user an opportunity to assess the accuracy of the answer
(is this what I am looking for?), and to find additional information that is related to the question,
and which may satisfy an information need. This has been implemented in a working multimodal
question answering system where it operates with two independently developed question
answering modules