Cooperative Question Answering for the Semantic Web

Abstract

In this paper we propose a Cooperative Question Answering System that takes as input queries expressed in natural language and is able to return a cooperative answer obtained from resources in the Sematic Web, more specifically DBpedia databases represented in OWL/RDF. Moreover, when the DBpedia provides no answer, we use the WordNet in order to build similar questions. Our system resorts to ontologies not only for reasoning but also to find answers and is independent of prior knowledge of the semantic resources by the user. The natural language question is translated into its semantic representation and then answered by consulting the semantics sources of information. If there are multiple answers to the question posed (or to the similar questions for which DBpedia contains answers), they will be grouped according to their semantic meaning, providing a more cooperative and clean answer to the user.