Question answering
Area of natural language processing concerned with systems that answer questions asked in natural language with a direct answer rather than a list of documents.
Question answering is a branch of natural language processing focused on systems that take a question in ordinary language and return a direct answer, not a ranked list of web pages or documents. Unlike a search engine, which points you to sources, a question-answering system is built to state the answer itself.
A famous example is IBM Watson, which won at Jeopardy! in 2011 against record champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (article). Today, chatbots and large language models also answer questions in natural language, though they use different technical approaches.