The document presents Qanary, a methodology and open source framework for building reusable question answering systems and components. Qanary aims to establish an ecosystem for the question answering community by defining a knowledge-driven methodology and providing a reference implementation that allows for isolated, interchangeable QA components and flexible QA processes. The framework represents knowledge about the QA process using RDF semantics and includes several tools and reusable components.

1. The Qanary Approach - Reusable
Question Answering Systems & Components
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
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W3C Community Group: Natural Language Interfaces on the Web of Data
September 12th, 2016
Leipzig, Germany

2. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
Qanary in a Nutshell
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⦿ methodology for creating question answering systems
○ easy-to-use approach
○ low requirements
⦿ supported by reference implementation
○ open source
○ RDF-driven
○ programming language independent
○ reusable components and management tools
○ …
⦿ goal: establish an ecosystem for the question answering
community

3. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
Derived Demands for Qanary
⦿ interoperable infrastructure
⦿ isolated and exchangeable
QA components by design
⦿ flexible QA component
granularity
⦿ free QA process
Motivation
Observations of State of the Art
⦿ limited compatibility
⦿ fixed QA process
⦿ less reusable
implementations
⦿ limited semantics in data
model
two goals of Qanary:
1. establish a knowledge-driven methodology
2. implement a reference implementation
3

4. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
1. knowledge of QA process
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⦿ established vocabulary for representing the knowledge about
a “Question Answering” process
○ represent the knowledge about the user’s question
○ use RDF semantics
○ make data accessible and changeable
⦿ result RDF-vocabulary “qa”
○ https://github.com/WDAqua/QAOntology
⦿ provided benefits:
○ reusable and extensible
○ provenance and trust represented
○ free of restrictions to particular QA process

5. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
⦿ reference implementation of Qanary approach
⦿ contributions:
○ methodology for implementing reusable, RDF-driven,
isolated QA components
○ out-of-the-box component orchestration platform for
easy to use distributed QA processes
○ several tools and service endpoints for easy data
access and manipulation
○ interface for benchmark execution, e.g.:
■ Question Answering over Linked Data, QALD
2. The Framework
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6. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
- Overview
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7. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
⦿ components
○ reusable services available as isolated services
○ typical components of existing QA systems like Named
Entity Disambiguation or Relation Detection
○ OKBQA components
○ ...
Components and Roadmap
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⦿ features coming very soon
○ auto-wiring of QA processes
○ self-optimizing QA processes
○ federated query, non-SPARQL query components
○ speech-to-text component
○ ...

8. Title
https://github.com/WDAqua/Qanary
Andreas Both, Kuldeep Singh, Dennis Diefenbach • WDAqua ITN
⦿ our overall goal: support community with ecosystem for better QA
system requiring less implementation efforts
Take Away Messages
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⦿ Qanary: new, yet mature methodology for creating:
○ components for question answering systems
○ feature-rich question answering systems
⦿ our contributions:
○ qa vocabulary: extensible knowledge representation
○ Qanary reference implementation
⦿ What should you do?
○ use Qanary, benefit from existing functionality
○ publish your own Qanary component
○ extend the “qa” vocabulary