Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-04-15 Abstract

AQUA: A Knowledge-Based Architecture for a Question Answering System
Techreport ID: kmi-04-15
Date: 2004
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, Enrico Motta

This paper describes AQUA, a question answering system. AQUA combines Natural Language processing (NLP), Ontologies, Logic, and Information Retrieval technologies in a uniform framework. AQUA makes intensive use of an ontology (which encodes knowledge) in several parts of the question answering system. The ontology is used in the refinement of the initial query, the reasoning process (a generalization/specialization process using classes and subclasses from the ontology), and in the novel similarity algorithm. The similarity algorithm is a key feature of AQUA. It is used to find similarities between relations/concepts in the translated query and relations/concepts in the ontological structures. The similarities detected then allow the interchange of concepts or relations in a logic formula corresponding to the user query. In this way, we make the mapping between user's queries and ontological spaces. The AQUA architecture is flexible enough to allow that AQUA can be used as closed-domain and open domain question answering system.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection