Abstract
We present the question-answering system Politician, which is a chatbot designed to imitate a fictional politician. The chatbot accepts questions on political issues and answers them accordingly.
The questions are analyzed using natural language processing techniques, mainly using a custom scenario built on Treex, and no complex knowledge base is involved. There are two working versions so far, in Czech and in English.
Once morphological and syntactic annotations are available for the question, an appropriate answer template is selected from the manually created set of answer templates based on the nouns, verbs and named entities present in the question. After that, the answer template is transformed into a grammatically correct reply.
We also briefly investigated the differences between the two languages and potential generalization of the approach to other topics. Apparently, morphological and syntactic information provides enough data for a very basic understanding of questions on a specific topic.