A Quick Prototype for Assessing OpenIE Knowledge Graph-Based Question-Answering Systems

Abstract

Due to the rapid growth of knowledge graphs (KG) as representational learning methods in recent years, question-answering approaches have received increasing attention from academia and industry. Question-answering systems use knowledge graphs to organize, navigate, search and connect knowledge entities. Managing such systems requires a thorough understanding of the underlying graph-oriented structures and, at the same time, an appropriate query language, such as SPARQL, to access relevant data. Natural language interfaces are needed to enable non-technical users to query ever more complex data. The paper proposes a question-answering approach to support end users in querying graph-oriented knowledge bases. The system pipeline is composed of two main modules: one is dedicated to translating a natural language query submitted by the user into a triple of the form <subject, predicate, object>, while the second module implements knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models, exploiting the previous module triple and retrieving the answer to the question. Our framework delivers a fast OpenIE-based knowledge extraction system and a graph-based answer prediction model for question-answering tasks. The system was designed by leveraging existing tools to accomplish a simple prototype for fast experimentation, especially across different knowledge domains, with the added benefit of reducing development time and costs. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system, which provides promising performance, as assessed at the module level. In particular, in some cases, the system outperforms the literature. Finally, a use case example shows the KG generated by user questions in a graphical interface provided by an ad-hoc designed web application.