openQA - Open-source Framework for Question Answering Over Linked Data

1. Hoverboard
Edgard Marx
AKSW
openqa.aksw.org

2. Links
 http://openqa.aksw.org
 http://github.com/aksw/openqa
 http://bitbuket.com/emarx/openqa
 http://bitbuket.com/emarx/openqa/faq

3. Agenda
 What is openQA?
 When should I use or not use openQA?
 History (idea, versions, problems)
 Myths and truths
 Hoverboard
 Architecture
 Features
 Conclusion & Future Work

4. What is openQA ?
 Frameworks
 Document Retrieval
 Lucene
 Solr
 Elastic (formal Elastic Search)
 Question Answering
 ?
 Not Frameworks
 Sina
 Hawk
 TBSL
 Google
It is a framework for
question answering
systems.

5. When should I use or not use openQA ?
 You should use if:
 Beginner in QA systems
 Do not want to write everything from scratch
 Have a social life and yet publish a good paper
 Benefit from the work of other specialists
 Share your code/approach with the community
 You should not use if:
 Does not need any of the built-in functionalities
 Best coder ever and you belive nobady codes better than you do
 Have plenty of time
 You are a sad person 

6. History
 Proposed in 2013 by Prof. Dr. Sören Auer
 Framework
 Open-source
 Combine different approaches
 Name from a visit to Bonn

7. History
 v0.0.4-beta (prototype)
 Features
 Different query parser plug-ins (SINA, TBSL)
 Designed for be used in two different enviroments Webserver/Standalone
 Problems
 Fixed pipeline
 Difficult to deploy
 Bugs

8.  v0.0.6-beta (No Websever)
 No Web-server
 v0.0.7-beta Hoverboard
 Flexible pipeline
 Webserver
 no Infograph (JSF)
 More than 300 downloads
 Used by students in Iran, Brazil, India,
Germany and Turkey!
History
2014
2015

9. Myths and truths
 It has a heavy architecture
 Myth, payload for the architecture is 0 milleseconds.
 It‘s huge
 Myth, the whole framework is 1.3 MB
 very few in comparision with systems like SINA (~800Mb)
and TBSL(~400)
 It just does not work
 Myth, in fact users misunderstood problems in the plugged systems with the
framework

10.  It‘s not like Google
 True 
 It‘s useless for industry
 True. openQA is useful for QA test
 The plugged approaches are not mature as the industry ones (a chicken egg problem)
 I can not travel through time
 True 
Myths and truths

11. Hoverboard
Architecture
Component
Service
Query Parser
Retriever
Synthesizer
Context
Tokenizer
Service
Old New

12. Hoverboard
Architecture
Service 1
Service N
Service 2
Component 1
Component 2
Component 3
Component 4
Component 5
What Can I do with it?

13. Hoverboard
Features
Front-End
Test / Evaluation (Benchmark)
Flexible pipeline
Bult-in JSON/REST
Hybrid Architecture (Web Service, Micro(Super, Mega
Hyper)-service, Plug-in)
NLP approaches (Lucene/Standford NLP)

14. Conclusion & Future Work
Is useful for test and benchmark
Improve the platform
Integrate other benchmarks
Increase the number of plugged approaches
It might be (future) used by ordinary
users and industry

15. Thanks
http://openqa.aksw.org