AquaLog: An Ontology-Portable Question Answering System for the Semantic Web

As semantic markup becomes ubiquitous, it will become important to be able to ask queries and obtain answers, using natural language (NL) expressions, rather than the keyword-based retrieval mechanisms used by the current search engines. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from the available semantic markup. We say that AquaLog is portable, because the configuration time required to customize the system for a particular ontology is negligible. AquaLog combines several powerful techniques in a novel way to make sense of NL queries and to map them to semantic markup. Moreover it also includes a learning component, which ensures that the performance of the system improves over time, in response to the particular community jargon used by the end users. In this paper we describe the current version of the system, in particular discussing its portability, its reasoning capabilities, and its learning mechanism.