The QALL-ME Framework: A Specifiable-Domain Multilingual Question Answering Architecture

Oscar Ferrandez, Christian Spurk, Milen Kouylekov, Iustin Dornescu, Sergio Ferrandez, Matteo Negri, Ruben Izquierdo, David Tomas, Constantin Orasan, Guenter Neumann, Bernardo Magnini, Jose L. Vicedo

Abstract


This paper presents the QALL-ME Framework, a reusable architecture for building multi- and
cross-lingual Question Answering (QA) systems working on structured data modelled by an ontology.
It is released as free open source software with a set of demo components and extensive
documentation, which makes it easy to use and adapt. The main characteristics of the QALL-ME
Framework are: (i) its domain portability, achieved by an ontology modelling the target domain; (ii)
the context awareness regarding space and time of the question; (iii) the use of textual entailment
engines as the core of the question interpretation; and (iv) an architecture based on Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA), which is realized using interchangeable web services for the framework
components. Furthermore, we present a running example to clarify how the framework processes
questions as well as a case study that shows a QA application built as an instantiation of the QALL-ME
Framework for cinema/movie events in the tourism domain.

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