An Ontology-based Question Answering Method with the Use of Textual Entailment

This paper presents a new method for ontology-based Question Answering (QA) with the use of textual entailment. In this method, a set of question patterns, called hypothesis questions, was automatically produced from a domain ontology, along with their corresponding SPARQL query templates for answer retrieval. Then the QA task was reduced to the problem of looking for the hypothesis question that was entailed by a user question and taking its corresponding query template to produce a complete query for retrieving the answers from underlying knowledge bases. An entailment engine was used to discover the entailed hypothesis questions with the help of question classification. An evaluation was carried out to assess the accuracy of the QA method, and the results revealed that most of the user questions (65%) can be correctly answered with a semantic entailment engine enhanced by the domain ontology.