My research contribution is centered on the application of theoretical linguistics to specific real-world problems, in particular to automated text-based question answering and summarisation. I joined the University of Zurich and became the principal researcher in the ExtrAns and WebExtrAns projects (from 1996 to 2001). Both projects were based on the development of answer extraction systems. Answer extraction systems locate those sentences in the source text that contain the answer posed by the user. The outcome of the project was a working system that handles questions about 500 manpages (a Web demo is available). I was the main contributor to the design of the logical forms and the question-answering method using the logical forms. The success of ExtrAns and WebExtrAns is evident from the fact that the system is widely cited as a pioneering question-answering system, an example of a question answering system of technical domains, and an example of the use of logical forms for question answering.