Why Reinvent the Wheel: Let's Build Question Answering Systems Together
Open accessAbstract
Modern question answering (QA) systems need to flexibly integrate a number of components specialised to fulfil specific tasks in a QA pipeline. Key QA tasks include Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation, Relation Extraction, and Query Building. Since a number of different software components exist that implement different strategies for each of these tasks, it is a major challenge to select and combine the most suitable components into a QA system, given the characteristics of a question. We study this optimisation problem and train classifiers, which take features of a question as input and have the goal of optimising the selection of QA components based on those features. We then devise a greedy algorithm to identify the pipelines that include the suitable components and can effectively answer the given question. We implement this model within Frankenstein, a QA framework able to select QA components and compose QA pipelines. We evaluate the effectiveness of the pipelines generated by Frankenstein using the QALD and LC-QuAD benchmarks. These results not only suggest that Frankenstein precisely solves the QA optimisation problem but also enables the automatic composition of optimised QA pipelines, which outperform the static Baseline QA pipeline. Thanks to this flexible and fully automated pipeline generation process, new QA components can be easily included in Frankenstein, thus improving the performance of the generated pipelines.
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Entity linking can affect relation linking (RL).
“Recent studies (Singh et al., 2018) have shown that entity linking can affect RL.”
From Implicit Relation Linking for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2022) · cites this paper as Singh et al., 2018
The Motivating Example (Section 2; page unavailable) places named entity disambiguation before relation linking, and Section 3.1 describes both tasks as transformations of a question’s representation. This supports a possible connection, but the cited passages do not report that changing entity-linking results affects relation-linking performance. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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Implicit Relation Linking for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph
Zhao, Y., Huang, J., Hu, W., Chen, Q., Qiu, X., Huo, C., & Ren, W. (2022) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.312 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
- Authors
- Singh, K., Lange, C., Vidal, M. E., Lehmann, J., Auer, S., Radhakrishna, A. S., Both, A., Shekarpour, S., Lytra, I., Usbeck, R., Vyas, A., Khikmatullaev, A., & Punjani, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Bonn (DE)
- Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library & Fraunhofer IAIS, Hannover, Germany
- Leibniz University Hannover (DE)
- University of Minnesota (US)
- DATEV (Germany) (DE)
- University of Dayton (US)
- Paderborn University (DE)
- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (GR)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '18
- Publisher
- ACM Press
- Published
- 2018
- Pages
- 1247-1256
- OpenAlex
- W2788460763
- Cited by
- 102
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 8
- FWCI
- 5.39
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- EU H2020 R&I programme for the Marie Skodowska-Curie action (WDAqua (GA No 642795))
- EU H2020 R&I (HOBBIT (GA688227))
- Eurostars project (QAMEL (E!9725))
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Keywords
- component selection, Frankenstein, named entity recognition, entity disambiguation, relation extraction, greedy algorithm, LC-QuAD
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