Mina: SeMantic virtual assistant for domain ontology based question-answering

Abstract

Aim of this article is to present the methodological nucleus of a custom Question-Answering system named Mina: a software solution with the ability to perform automated search over an ontological representation of localized knowledge domains, in order to extract fine-grained information so as to respond to user queries expressed as natural language questions. First the pipeline adopted by Mina will be presented, focusing on the multi-agent nature of the system Mina exists within, consisting of a distributed and dynamic environment on which several autonomous software (the so called agents) coexist and cooperate to perform specific tasks. Second we will focus on the strategies Mina exploits for the extraction of the correct answer which needs to be provided, starting with the introduction of the NC_Common_Lang library, a collection of linguistic analysis tools, adopted for the extraction of intents and entities contained within user queries; following up we’ll show the ontological representation of a specific knowledge sphere - the telecommunication domain in our case - describing the structured scheme of concepts and relationships according to which the answer retrieval operation is performed, querying the ontology through Description Logic inferences. As a final instance, three different test scenarios are presented with the intent to provide solid evidence about the correct functioning of Mina.