On November 21st, AKSW group was hosting the 1st meetup on “Question Answering” (QA) systems. In this meeting, researchers from AKSW/University of Leipzig, CITEC/University of Bielefeld, Fraunhofer IAIS/University of Bon, DERI/National University of Ireland and the University of Passau presented the recent results of their work on QA systems. The following themes were discussed during the meeting:
- Ontology-driven QA on the Semantic Web. Christina Unger presented Pythia system for ontology-based QA. Slides are available here.
- Distributed Semantic Models for achieving scalability & consistency on QA. André Freitas presented TREO and EasyESA which employ vector-based approach for semantic approximation.
- Template-based QA. Jens Lehmann presented TBSL for Template-based Question Answering over RDF Data.
- Keyword-based QA. Saeedeh Shekarpour presented SINA approach for semantic interpretation of user queries for QA on interlinked data.
- Hybrid QA over Linked Data. Ricardo Usbeck presented HAWK for hybrid question answering using Linked Data and full-text indizes.
- Semantic Parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammars (CCG). Sherzod Hakimov. Slides are available here.
- QA on statistical Linked Data. Konrad Höffner presented LinkedSpending and RDF Data Cube vocabulary to apply QA on statistical Linked Data.
- WDAqua (Web Data and Question Answering) project. Christoph Lange presented the WDAqua project which is part of the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Innovative Training Networks. WDAqua focuses on answering different aspects of the question, “how can we answer complex questions with web data?”
- OKBQA (Open Knowledge Base & Question-Answering). Axel-C. Ngonga Ngomo presented OKBQA which aims to bring cutting edge experts in knowledge base construction and application in order to create an extensive architecture for QA systems which has no restriction on programming languages.
- Open QA. Edgard Marx presented open source question answering framework that unifies QA approaches from several domain experts.
The meetup decided to meet biannually to fuse efforts. All agreed upon investigating existing architecture for question answering systems to be able to offer a promising, collaborative architecture for future endeavours. Join us next time! For more information contact Ricardo Usbeck.
Ali and Ricardo on behalf of the QA meetup
