Automated question answering using semantic Web services

Abstract

Question answering(QA) can vastly improve the quality and effectiveness of knowledge acquisition on the web. Web search provides a list of documents targeted based on the keywords coined by the users; users need to investigate further the documents to obtain the very knowledge they wanted. QA can come up with the knowledge itself ready to be conceived directly by the users. We present a framework for building QA systems on the open web, based on semantic web services(SWS). In our framework, natural language(NL) questions are translated into a frame-based structure; semantic service discovery is performed to extract the knowledge for answering the questions; and knowledge mediation is performed to formulate answers. Based on SWS framework and web ontology, knowledge sources can be dynamically expanded, discovered, and mediated for QA. We show the plausibility of our approach by describing an implementation and a step-wise answering scenario with a sample query. © 2007 IEEE.