Ontology‐lexicon–based question answering over linked data

Abstract

Recently, Linked Open Data has become a large set of knowledge bases. Therefore, the need to query Linked Data using question answering (QA) techniques has attracted the attention of many researchers. A QA system translates natural language questions into structured queries, such as SPARQL queries, to be executed over Linked Data. The two main challenges in such systems are lexical and semantic gaps. A lexical gap refers to the difference between the vocabularies used in an input question and those used in the knowledge base. A semantic gap refers to the difference between expressed information needs and the representation of the knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel method using an ontology lexicon and dependency parse trees to overcome lexical and semantic gaps. The proposed technique is evaluated on the QALD-5 benchmark and exhibits promising results.