Qanary – A Methodology for Vocabulary-driven Open Question Answering Systems

Andreas Both , Dennis Diefenbach (1) , Kuldeep Singh (2) , Saedeeh Shekarpour , Didier Cherix , Christoph Lange (3)

1 LHC - Laboratoire Hubert Curien
2 IIT Kanpur - Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
3 Universität Bonn = University of Bonn

It is very challenging to access the knowledge expressed within (big) data sets. Question answering (QA) aims at making sense out of data via a simple-to-use interface. However, QA systems are very complex and earlier approaches are mostly singular and monolithic implementations for QA in specific domains. Therefore, it is cumbersome and inefficient to design and implement new or improved approaches, in particular as many components are not reusable. Hence, there is a strong need for enabling best-of-breed QA systems, where the best performing components are combined, aiming at the best quality achievable in the given domain. Taking into account the high variety of functionality that might be of use within a QA system and therefore reused in new QA systems, we provide an approach driven by a core QA vocabulary that is aligned to existing, powerful ontologies provided by domain-specific communities. We achieve this by a methodology for binding existing vocabularies to our core QA vocabulary without recreating the information provided by external components. We thus provide a practical approach for rapidly establishing new (domain-specific) QA systems, while the core QA vocabulary is re-usable across multiple domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to open QA systems that is agnostic to implementation details and that inherently follows the linked data principles.

Mots clés: Question Answering; Semantic Search; Ontologies; Annotation Model; Semantic Web; Software Reusability

Domaines: Base de données [cs.DB]

Andreas Both, Dennis Diefenbach, Kuldeep Singh, Saedeeh Shekarpour, Didier Cherix, et al.. Qanary – A Methodology for Vocabulary-driven Open Question Answering Systems. 13th ESWC 2016, May 2016, Heraklion, Greece. ⟨hal-01637042⟩