Question answering (QA) has been the subject of a resurgence over the past years. The said resurgence has led to a multitude of question answering (QA) systems being developed both by companies and research facilities. While a few components of QA systems get reused across implementations, most systems do not leverage the full potential of component reuse. Hence, the development of QA systems is currently still a tedious and time-consuming process. We address the challenge of accelerating the creation of novel or tailored QA systems by presenting a concept for a self-wiring approach to composing QA systems. Our approach will allow the reuse of existing, web-based QA systems or modules while developing new QA platforms. To this end, it will rely on QA modules being described using the Web Ontology Language. Based on these descriptions, our approach will be able to automatically compose QA systems using a data-driven approach automatically.
QALL-ME @cite_2 is another open source approach using an architecture skeleton for multilingual QA, a domain- as well as a domain-independent ontology. The underling SOA architecture features several web service which are composed to a QA system in a predetermined way.
@cite_2
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This paper presents the QALL-ME Framework, a reusable architecture for building multi- and cross-lingual Question Answering (QA) systems working on structured data modelled by an ontology. It is released as free open source software with a set of demo components and extensive documentation, which makes it easy to use and adapt. The main characteristics of the QALL-ME Framework are: (i) its domain portability, achieved by an ontology modelling the target domain; (ii) the context awareness regarding space and time of the question; (iii) the use of textual entailment engines as the core of the question interpretation; and (iv) an architecture based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is realized using interchangeable web services for the framework components. Furthermore, we present a running example to clarify how the framework processes questions as well as a case study that shows a QA application built as an instantiation of the QALL-ME Framework for cinema movie events in the tourism domain.