The exponential growth of online information has led to the development of technologies that help to deal with it. One of those information retrieval technologies is Question Answering (QA), a research field that has emerged at the intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, which allows users to find the answers to their questions in precise way. However, to cope up with changing needs of user, the recent QA system differ widely in the manner they interact

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... to the user than the conventional one. Therefore, this paper attempts to present the state-of-the-art in the field of text based automatic question answering systems and provide a qualitative analysis of different facets. Finally, a summarized representation of these facets based on certain features of QA system has been done, to bring an insight for the future research.