Applying Semantic Parsing to Question Answering Over Linked Data: Addressing the Lexical Gap

Question answering over linked data has emerged in the past years as an important topic of research in order to provide natural language access to a growing body of linked open data on the Web. In this paper we focus on analyzing the lexical gap that arises as a challenge for any such question answering system. The lexical gap refers to the mismatch between the vocabulary used in a user question and the vocabulary used in the relevant dataset. We implement a semantic parsing approach and evaluate it on the QALD-4 benchmark, showing that the performance of such an approach suffers from training data sparseness. Its performance can, however, be substantially improved if the right lexical knowledge is available. To show this, we model a set of lexical entries by hand to quantify the number of entries that would be needed. Further, we analyze if a state-of-the-art tool for inducing ontology lexica from corpora can derive these lexical entries automatically. We conclude that further research and investments are needed to derive such lexical knowledge automatically or semi-automatically.