Special issue on interactive question answering: Introduction

In this introduction, we present our overview of interactive question answering (IQA). We contextualize IQA in the wider field of question answering, and establish connections to research in Information Retrieval and Dialogue Systems. We highlight the development of QA as a field, and identify challenges in the present research paradigm for which IQA is a potential solution. Finally, we present an overview of papers in this special issue, drawing connections between these and the challenges they address.