Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Introduction to Question Answering over Linked Data

  • Chapter
Reasoning Web. Reasoning on the Web in the Big Data Era (Reasoning Web 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8714))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

While the amount of knowledge available as linked data grows, so does the need for providing end users with access to this knowledge. Especially question answering systems are receiving much interest, as they provide intuitive access to data via natural language and shield end users from technical aspects related to data modelling, vocabularies and query languages. This tutorial gives an introduction to the rapidly developing field of question answering over linked data. It gives an overview of the main challenges involved in the interpretation of a user’s information need expressed in natural language with respect to the data that is queried. The paper summarizes the main existing approaches and systems including available tools and resources, benchmarks and evaluation campaigns. Finally, it lists the open topics that will keep question answering over linked data an exciting area of research in the years to come.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Androutsopoulos, L.: Natural language interfaces to databases – an introduction. Journal of Natural Language Engineering 1(1), 29–81 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Berant, J., Chou, A., Frostig, R., Liang, P.: Semantic parsing on Freebase from question-answer pairs. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bernstein, A., Kaufmann, E., Kaiser, C.: Querying the semantic web with GiNSENG: A guided input natural language search engine. In: 15th Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, Las Vegas, NV, pp. 112–126 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bringert, B., Cooper, R., Ljunglöf, P., Ranta, A.: Multimodal dialogue system grammars. In: Proceedings of DIALOR 2005, Ninth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 53–60 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cabrio, E., Cojan, J., Aprosio, A.P., Magnini, B., Lavelli, A., Gandon, F.: QAKiS: an open domain QA system based on relational patterns. In: Proceedings of the ISWC 2012 Posters & Demonstrations Track. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 914 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cai, Q., Yates, A.: Large-scale semantic parsing via schema matching and lexicon extension. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cimiano, P.: Flexible semantic composition with DUDES. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics, IWCS 2009 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Cimiano, P., Buitelaar, P., McCrae, J., Sintek, M.: LexInfo: A declarative model for the lexicon-ontology interface. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 9(1), 29–51 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Cimiano, P., Haase, P., Heizmann, J., Mantel, M., Studer, R.: Towards portable natural language interfaces to knowledge bases – the case of the ORAKEL system. Data & Knowledge Engineering 65(2), 325–354 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Damljanovic, D., Agatonovic, M., Cunningham, H.: FREyA: an interactive way of querying linked data using natural language. In: García-Castro, R., Fensel, D., Antoniou, G. (eds.) ESWC 2011 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 7117, pp. 125–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Damljanovic, D., Tablan, V., Bontcheva, K.: A text-based query interface to OWL ontologies. In: 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2008 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kalyanpur, A., et al.: Structured data and inference in DeepQA. IBM Journal of Research & Development 56(3/4) (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ferrucci, D., et al.: Building Watson: an overview of the DeepQA project. AI Magazine 31(3), 59–79 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Fader, A., Zettlemoyer, L., Etzioni, O.: Open question answering over curated and extracted knowledge bases. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD (to appear, 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Freitas, A., Curry, E.: Natural Language Queries over Heterogeneous Linked Data Graphs: A Distributional-Compositional Semantics Approach. In: 18th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2014 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Freitas, A., Curry, E., O’Riain, S.: A Distributional Approach for Terminology-Level Semantic Search on the Linked Data Web. In: 27th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2012). ACM Press (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Freitas, A., Oliveira, J.G., O’Riain, S., Curry, E., Pereira da Silva, J.C.: Querying linked data using semantic relatedness: a vocabulary independent approach. In: Muñoz, R., Montoyo, A., Métais, E. (eds.) NLDB 2011. LNCS, vol. 6716, pp. 40–51. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Gabrilovich, E., Markovitch, S.: Computing semantic relatedness using Wikipedia-based Explicit Semantic Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligence (IJCAI 2007), pp. 1606–1611 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Gerber, D., Ngomo, A.-C.N.: Bootstrapping the linked data web. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Giannone, C., Bellomaria, V., Basili, R.: A HMM-based approach to question answering against linked data. In: Proceedings of the Question Answering over Linked Data lab (QALD-3) at CLEF 2013. LNCS. Springer (2013) (to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Gómez-Pérez, A., Vila-Suero, D., Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Gracia, J., de Cea, G.A.: Guidelines for multilingual linked data. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS 2013), pp. 3:1–3:12. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Harris, Z.: Distributional structure. Word 10(2-3), 146–162 (1954)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Kaufmann, E., Bernstein, A., Zumstein, R.: A natural language interface to query ontologies based on clarification dialogs. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Kim, J.-D., Cohen, K.B.: Natural language query processing for SPARQL generation: A prototype system for SNOMED-CT. In: Proceedings of BioLINK SIG (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Kwiatkowski, T., Choi, E., Artzi, Y., Zettlemoyer, L.: Scaling semantic parsers with on-the-fly ontology matching. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 1545–1556 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Li, X., Roth, D.: Learning question classifiers. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2002), pp. 556–562 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Lopez, V., Fernández, M., Motta, E., Stieler, N.: PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the Semantic Web. Semantic Web 3(3), 249–265 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Lopez, V., Unger, C., Cimiano, P., Motta, E.: Evaluating question answering over linked data. Journal of Web Semantics 21 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Lopez, V., Uren, V., Motta, E., Pasin, M.: Aqualog: An ontology-driven question answering system for organizational semantic intranets. Journal of Web Semantics 5(2), 72–105 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Lopez, V., Uren, V., Sabou, M., Motta, E.: Is question answering fit for the semantic web? a survey. Semantic Web Journal 2, 125–155 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. McCrae, J., Aguado de Cea, G., Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P., Declerck, T., Gomez-Perez, A., Garcia, J., Hollink, L., Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Spohr, D.: Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web. Language Resources and Evaluation 46(4), 701–719 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Popescu, A.-M., Armanasu, A., Etzioni, O., Ko, D., Yates, A.: Modern natural language interfaces to databases: Composing statistical parsing with semantic tractability. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2004. Association for Computational Linguistics (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Sawant, U., Chakrabarti, S.: Learning joint query interpretation and response ranking. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2013), pp. 1099–1110 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Shekarpour, S., Ngomo, A.-C.N., Auer, S.: Question answering on interlinked data. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 1145–1156 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Tran, T., Wang, H., Rudolph, S., Cimiano, P.: Top-k exploration of query candidates for efficient keyword search on graph-shaped (RDF) data. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 405–416 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Unger, C., Hieber, F., Cimiano, P.: Generating LTAG grammars from a lexicon-ontology interface. In: Bangalore, S., Frank, R., Romero, M. (eds.) 10th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms, TAG+10 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Unger, C., Bühmann, L., Lehmann, J., Ngomo, A.-C.N., Gerber, D., Cimiano, P.: Template-based question answering over RDF data. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 639–648. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Unger, C., Cimiano, P.: Pythia: Compositional meaning construction for ontology-based question answering on the semantic web. In: Muñoz, R., Montoyo, A., Métais, E. (eds.) NLDB 2011. LNCS, vol. 6716, pp. 153–160. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  39. Walter, S., Unger, C., Cimiano, P.: A corpus-based approach for the induction of ontology lexica. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Saraee, M., Sugumaran, V., Vadera, S. (eds.) NLDB 2013. LNCS, vol. 7934, pp. 102–113. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  40. Yahya, M., Berberich, K., Elbassuoni, S., Weikum, G.: Robust question answering over the web of linked data. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, pp. 1107–1116. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CITEC, Bielefeld University, Inspiration 1, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany

    Christina Unger & Philipp Cimiano

  2. Insight, National University of Galway (NUIG), Galway, Ireland

    André Freitas

Authors
  1. Christina Unger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. André Freitas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Philipp Cimiano
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

    Manolis Koubarakis

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou Campus, 15780, Zografou, Greece

    Giorgos Stamou

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, Greece

    Giorgos Stoilos

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ian Horrocks

  5. University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Phokion Kolaitis

  6. Institute for Informatics, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Georg Lausen

  7. Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Gerhard Weikum

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Unger, C., Freitas, A., Cimiano, P. (2014). An Introduction to Question Answering over Linked Data. In: Koubarakis, M., et al. Reasoning Web. Reasoning on the Web in the Big Data Era. Reasoning Web 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8714. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10587-1_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10587-1_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10586-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10587-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation