Architecture of an Ontology-Based Domain-Specific Natural Language Question Answering System

TL;DR

This paper presents an architecture for a domain-specific natural language question answering system that leverages ontological knowledge to improve accuracy and handle complex queries, achieving 94% accuracy in tests.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel architecture integrating ontologies with NLP techniques for domain-specific QA, enhancing question processing and answer extraction capabilities.

Findings

Achieved 94% accuracy in domain-specific question answering

Developed a four-module architecture for NLQA systems

Utilized ontologies for query reformulation and relation identification

Abstract

Question answering (QA) system aims at retrieving precise information from a large collection of documents against a query. This paper describes the architecture of a Natural Language Question Answering (NLQA) system for a specific domain based on the ontological information, a step towards semantic web question answering. The proposed architecture defines four basic modules suitable for enhancing current QA capabilities with the ability of processing complex questions. The first module was the question processing, which analyses and classifies the question and also reformulates the user query. The second module allows the process of retrieving the relevant documents. The next module processes the retrieved documents, and the last module performs the extraction and generation of a response. Natural language processing techniques are used for processing the question and documents and also for answer extraction. Ontology and domain knowledge are used for reformulating queries and identifying the relations. The aim of the system is to generate short and specific answer to the question that is asked in the natural language in a specific domain. We have achieved 94 % accuracy of natural language question answering in our implementation.