A survey on question answering systems over linked data and documents

• Published in: Journal of intelligent information systems 2020-10, Vol.55 (2), p.233-259
• Main Authors: Dimitrakis, Eleftherios, Sgontzos, Konstantinos, Tzitzikas, Yannis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science; Data Structures and Information Theory; Information Storage and Retrieval; IT in Business; Linked Data; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Query languages; Questions; Systems analysis; Tourism; Unstructured data
• ISSN: 0925-9902; 1573-7675
• DOI: 10.1007/s10844-019-00584-7

Question Answering (QA) systems aim at supplying precise answers to questions, posed by users in a natural language form. They are used in a wide range of application areas, from bio-medicine to tourism. Their underlying knowledge source can be structured data (e.g. RDF graphs and SQL databases), unstructured data in the form of plain text (e.g. textual excerpts from Wikipedia), or combinations of the above. In this paper we survey the recent work that has been done in the area of stateless QA systems with emphasis on methods that have been applied in RDF and Linked Data, documents, and mixtures of these. We identify the main challenges, we categorize the existing approaches according to various aspects, we review 21 recent systems, and 23 evaluation and training datasets that are most commonly used in the literature categorized according to the type of the domain, the underlying knowledge source, the provided tasks, and the associated evaluation metrics.