Addressing ontology-based question answering with collections of user queries

This paper presents QACID an ontology-based Question Answering system applied to the CInema Domain. This system allows users to retrieve information from formal ontologies by using as input queries formulated in natural language. The original characteristic of QACID is the strategy used to fill the gap between users’ expressiveness and formal knowledge representation. This approach is based on collections of user queries and offers a simple adaptability to deal with multilingual capabilities, inter-domain portability and changes in user information requirements. All these capabilities permit developing Question Answering applications for actual users. This system has been developed and tested on the Spanish language and using an ontology modelling the cinema domain. The performance level achieved enables the use of the system in real environments. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.