The MOQA "meaning-oriented question answering" project experimented with integrating knowledge-based text processing with real-world reasoning in a question-answering system. The MOQA system created ontologically-grounded semantic representations of the meaning of texts, stored those representations in a structured fact repository, then attempted to answer questions by searching in the fact repository rather than in raw text.

MOQA was carried out by a team consisting of ILIT, the Computing Research Laboratory (CRL) of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, and CoGenTex, Inc. of Ithaca, NY. It covered all three main technical areas of the ARDA AQUAINT program: question understanding and interpretation, determining the answer and presenting the answer.