QAF: Frame Semantics-based Question Interpretation

Natural language questions are interpreted to a sequence of patterns to be matched with instances of patterns in a knowledge base (KB) for answering. A natural language (NL) question answering (QA) system utilizes meaningful patterns matching the syntactic/lexical features between the NL questions and KB. In the most of KBs, there are only binary relations in triple form to represent relation between two entities or entity and a value using the domain specific ontology. However, the binary relation representation is not enough to cover complex information in questions, and the ontology vocabulary sometimes does not cover the lexical meaning in questions. Complex meaning needs a knowledge representation to link the binary relation-type triples in KB. In this paper, we propose a frame semantics-based semantic parsing approach as KB-independent question pre-processing. We will propose requirements of question interpretation in the KBQA perspective, and a query form representation based on our proposed format QAF (Question Answering with the Frame Semantics), which is supposed to cover the requirements. In QAF, frame semantics roles as a model to represent complex information in questions and to disambiguate the lexical meaning in questions to match with the ontology vocabulary. Our system takes a question as an input and outputs QAF-query by the process which assigns semantic information in the question to its corresponding frame semantic structure using the semantic parsing rules.