Natural Language Question Answering Over RDF: A Graph Data Driven Approach

Abstract

RDF question/answering (Q/A) allows users to ask questions in natural languages over a knowledge base represented by RDF. To answer a national language question, the existing work takes a two-stage approach: question understanding and query evaluation. Their focus is on question understanding to deal with the disambiguation of the natural language phrases. The most common technique is the joint disambiguation, which has the exponential search space. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework to answer natural language questions over RDF repository (RDF Q/A) from a graph data-driven perspective. We propose a semantic query graph to model the query intention in the natural language question in a structural way, based on which, RDF Q/A is reduced to subgraph matching problem. More importantly, we resolve the ambiguity of natural language questions at the time when matches of query are found. The cost of disambiguation is saved if there are no matching found. We compare our method with some state-of-the-art RDF Q/A systems in the benchmark dataset. Extensive experiments confirm that our method not only improves the precision but also speeds up query performance greatly.