Towards a Question Answering System over the Semantic Web

Tracking #: 2038-3251

Authors: 
Dennis Diefenbach
Andreas Both
Kamal Singh
Pierre Maret

Responsible editor: 
Axel Polleres

Submission type: 
Full Paper
Abstract: 
With the development of the Semantic Web, a lot of new structured data has become available on the Web in the form of knowledge bases (KBs). Making this valuable data accessible and usable for end-users is one of the main goals of question answering (QA) over KBs. Most current QA systems query one KB, in one language (namely English). The existing approaches are not designed to be easily adaptable to new KBs and languages. We first introduce a new approach for translating natural language questions to SPARQL queries. It is able to query several KBs simultaneously, in different languages, and can easily be ported to other KBs and languages. In our evaluation, the impact of our approach is proven using 5 different well-known and large KBs: Wikidata, DBpedia, MusicBrainz, DBLP and Freebase as well as 5 different languages namely English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Second, we show how we integrated our approach, to make it easily accessible by the research community and by end-users. To summarize, we provide a conceptional solution for multilingual, KB-agnostic question answering over the Semantic Web. The provided first approximation validates this concept.
Full PDF Version: 
Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By John McCrae submitted on 20/Nov/2018
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

This paper describes a 'language-independent' method for answering questions over linked data knowledge bases. While, I remain skeptical of claims of language independence given the dependence on labels and the weakness with respect to morphologically complex language, the authors do address these issues more explicitly in this value.

My previous comments regarding the formatting of the tables have still not been addressed, with table 3 still being quite hard to read. Further, Tables 4,5,7,8 all exceed the margin.

A few minor errors I noticed in this read:
p1. "life-science" => "life sciences"
p2. comma in "5810"
p7. "Or text corpora" => "Alternatively, text corpora"
p7. "word-embeddings" => "word embeddings"