  In this paper, we motivate the need for a publicly available, generic
software framework for question-answering (QA) systems. We present an
open-source QA framework QANUS which researchers can leverage on to build new
QA systems easily and rapidly. The framework implements much of the code that
will otherwise have been repeated across different QA systems. To demonstrate
the utility and practicality of the framework, we further present a fully
functioning factoid QA system QA-SYS built on top of QANUS.
