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.
One of the earliest works is openQA @cite_10 which is a modular open-source framework for implementing QA systems. openQA's main work-flow consists of four stages ( interpretation , retrieval , synthesis and rendering ) as well as adjacent modules ( context and service ) written as rigid Java interfaces. The authors claim that openQA enables a conciliation of different architectures and methods.
@cite_10
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Billions of facts pertaining to a multitude of domains are now available on the Web as RDF data. However, accessing this data is still a difficult endeavour for non-expert users. In order to meliorate the access to this data, approaches imposing minimal hurdles to their users are required. Although many question answering systems over Linked Data have being proposed, retrieving the desired data is still significantly challenging. In addition, developing and evaluating question answering systems remains a very complex task. To overcome these obstacles, we present a modular and extensible open-source question answering framework. We demonstrate how the framework can be used by integrating two state-of-the-art question answering systems. As a result our evaluation shows that overall better results can be achieved by the use of combination rather than individual stand-alone versions.