What is the current status of systems which can answer questions framed from a given text article?
Question Generation (QG) [1] and Question Answering (QA) [2] are two different things. In terms of question answering systems (QA systems), I suggest looking at the Ephyra Question Answering System (OpenEphyra) [3].
As part of my Meta-Guide.com project, I’m currently running an experiment on Twitter, parsing travel questions off the Twitter firehose and running them into two different conversational agents (chatbots) at @VagaBot [4] and @TwavelAdvisor [5]. Over the past year I have accumulated more than 36,000 unique travel questions.
[1] http://www.questiongeneration.org
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering
[4] http://twitter.com/vagabot
[5] http://twitter.com/twaveladvisor