Identification of the Question Focus: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-based Lookup through the User Interaction

Most question-answering systems contain a classifier module which determines a question category, based on which each question is assigned an answer type. However, setting up syntactic patterns for this classification is a big challenge. In addition, in the case of ontology-based systems, the answer type should be aligned to the queried knowledge structure. We present an approach for determining the answer type semi-automatically, by combining syntactic parsing with ontology reasoning. When this combination is not enough to make conclusions automatically, we engage the user into a dialog. User selections are saved and used for training the system in order to improve its performance over time. The answer type is used to show the feedback and the concise answer to the user. Our approach is evaluated using 250 questions from the Mooney Geoquery dataset. 1.