Preliminary multi-lingual evaluation of a question answering system based on the node of knowledge method

Abstract

The Node of Knowledge (NOK) method is a method for knowledge representation. It is used as a basis for development of formalism for textual knowledge representation (FNOK). FNOK was used for development of a Question Answering (QA) System whose research results are presented in this paper. The QA system is based on storing text in relational databases without losing semantics and it is implemented in Oracle. In this paper, we present the results of preliminary evaluation of the QA system for its independency on the language used. The system was tested using the same set of sentences and questions translated in English, German, Italian and Croatian language. Knowledge in the system was based on 26 simple sentences. 44 questions were set, and the system offered 62 answers for each language (some questions had more than one answer). Research results have shown that this QA system can be used for any of the four languages without the need to change functions and algorithms. It is only necessary to set the dictionary data for each language, implement synonyms and recognize different word forms.