WikiQA — A question answering system on Wikipedia using freebase, DBpedia and Infobox

Abstract

Question Answering (QA) system is the task where arbitrary question IS posed in the form of natural language statements and a brief and concise text returned as an answer. Contrary to search engines where a long list of relevant documents returned as a result of a query, QA system aims at providing the direct answer or passage containing the answer. We propose a general purpose question answering system which can answer wh-interrogated questions. This system is using Wikipedia data as its knowledge source. We have implemented major components of a QA system which include challenging tasks of Named Entity Tagging, Question Classification, Information Retrieval and Answer Extraction. Implementation of state-of-the-art Entity Tagging mechanism has helped identify entities where systems like OpenEphyra or DBpedia spotlight have failed. The information retrieval task includes development of a framework to extract tabular information known as Infobox from Wikipedia pages which has ensured availability of latest updated information. Answer Extraction module has implemented an attributes mapping mechanism which is helpful to extract answer from data. The system is comparable in results with other available general purpose QA systems.