Application of First-Order Logic Inference in Vietnamese Question Answering System

The aim of this research is to develop a Question-Answering (QA) system which is based on a First-Order Logic (FOL) inference mechanism to determine answers for Vietnamese questions about outage schedule of electricity and water in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In this paper, firstly we focus on parsing the syntax, and secondly on representing the semantics, which are built in form of FOL formulas, of many types of usual Vietnamese questions. Finally, based on the FOL formulas of questions, the system finds out the information in knowledge base, and performs some inferences on time and location to answer user's questions. In experiment, the precision of our Vietnamese QA system is 92.67% with 300 testing questions about schedule of power outage and cut water.