A Domain-Specific Question Answering System Based on Ontology and Question Templates

The rapid growth in the development of Internet-based information systems increases the demand for natural language interfaces that are easy to set up and maintain. Unfortunately, the problem of deep understanding natural language queries is far from being solved. In this paper, an automated question answering system based on domain ontology and question template is proposed, which does not need deep understanding of user's questions. Ontology was employed to model the interesting domain, and properties of concepts are described by a collection of question templates. The system captures a user's intention by matching his questions to predefined templates, and return answers corresponding to template’s query focus. The system has been applied to mobile service consulting area, and experimental results show that the system has high practicability as well as maintainability.