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Tech Report kmi-04-20 Abstract


AQUA: A Question Answering System for Heterogeneous Sources
Techreport ID: kmi-04-20
Date: 2004
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, Enrico Motta
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This paper describes AQUA our question answering over the Web. AQUA was designed to work over heterogeneous sources. This means that AQUA is equipped to work as closed domain and in addition to open-domain question answering. As a first instance, AQUA tries to answer a question using a Knowledge base. If a query cannot be satisfied over a knowledge base/database. Then, AQUA tries to find an answer on web pages (i.e. it uses as corpus the internet as resource). Our system uses NLP (Natural Language Processing), First order logic and Information Extraction technologies. AQUA has been tested using an ontology which describes academic life. Keywords Ontologies, Information Extraction, Machine Learning
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.