Open-domain question answering framework using Wikipedia

This paper explores the feasibility of implementing a model for an open domain, automated question and answering framework that leverages Wikipedia’s knowledgebase. While Wikipedia implicitly comprises answers to common questions, the disambiguation of natural language and the difficulty of developing an information retrieval process that produces answers with specificity present pertinent challenges. However, observational analysis suggests that it is possible to discount the syntactical and lexical structure of a sentence in contexts where questions contain a specific target entity (words that identify a person, location or organisation) and that correspondingly query a property related to it. To investigate this, we implemented an algorithmic process that extracted the target entity from the question using CRF based named entity recognition (NER) and utilised all remaining words as potential properties. Using DBPedia, an ontological database of Wikipedia’s knowledge, we searched for the closest matching property that would produce an answer by applying standardised string matching algorithms including the Levenshtein distance, similar text and Dice’s coefficient. Our experimental results illustrate that using Wikipedia as a knowledgebase produces high precision for questions that contain a singular unambiguous entity as the subject, but lowered accuracy for questions where the entity exists as part of the object.