Question answering system for semantic web: a review

Abstract

Searching huge and heterogeneous contents from the web has become an increasingly challenging task with the contemporary growth of semantic web. In order to make the vision of semantic web a reality, some user-friendly interfaces are needed. Because of the complexity of natural language, question answering systems over semantic web presents many challenges. This work presents a survey on question answering (QA), which has emerged as an important tool in recent years to exploit the opportunities offered by semantic information on the web. It provides a comprehensive view by analysing the history of QA research field developed in the past, from open domain question answering system to the latest semantic question answering solutions. We explored the potential of question answering techniques to go beyond the current state of the art to support users in reusing and querying the semantic web contents. In the initial part of article, the classification of question answering systems (QAS), based on types of questions has been discussed. The later part discusses the common challenges of QA over semantic web, solutions, and suggested recommendations for future systems.