HOW can a system detect questions on Quora and auto-answer them?
Nuts and bolts:
Think APIs…. Any two systems with APIs can be paired relatively easily. There are an increasing number of natural language question answering APIs available, for example Wolfram|Alpha API. Unfortunately, there is no publicQuora API yet.
However, Quora questions may be detected automatically via RSS feed, and every individual Quora topic has its own RSS feed; though, it does seem that Quora is following Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and others, in hiding or eliminating their RSS feeds. 🙁 Beyond RSS feeds, it is also relatively straightforward to scrape websites like Quora, using any number of widely available tools, in effect creating your own API.
It would probably not be so hard to set up a test using select Quora RSS feeds and the new IBM Watson API, for instance; however, I believe IBM is still requiring approval for use. In order to post the answers back without a public Quora API, there are any number of web macro programs available, often used for browser emulation and software testing.
See also my recent Quora answer to: