# Towards a Question Answering System over the Semantic Web

Source: [Towards a Question Answering System over the Semantic Web](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa64101e209131cea02766>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T20:56:11.088Z

Authors: Dennis Diefenbach, Andreas Both, Kamal Singh, Pierre Maret

Published: 2018-03-02T12:59:50.000Z

## Abstract

Thanks to the development of the Semantic Web, a lot of new structured data has become available on the Web in the form of knowledge bases (KBs). Making this valuable data accessible and usable for end-users is one of the main goals of Question Answering (QA) over KBs. Most current QA systems query one KB, in one language (namely English). The existing approaches are not designed to be easily adaptable to new KBs and languages. We first introduce a new approach for translating natural language questions to SPARQL queries. It is able to query several KBs simultaneously, in different languages, and can easily be ported to other KBs and languages. In our evaluation, the impact of our approach is proven using 5 different well-known and large KBs: Wikidata, DBpedia, MusicBrainz, DBLP and Freebase as well as 5 different languages namely English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Second, we show how we integrated our approach, to make it easily accessible by the research community and by end-users. To summarize, we provided a conceptional solution for multilingual, KB-agnostic Question Answering over the Semantic Web. The provided first approximation validates this concept.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Knowledge Graph Question Answering on LC-QuAD 2.0 Wikidata dump 20 April 2021 NLIWOD (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/knowledge-graph-question-answering-on-lc-quad-2-0-wikidata-dump-20-april-2021-nliwod-test.md>): Knowledge Graph Question Answering; LC-QuAD 2.0 Wikidata dump 20 April 2021 NLIWOD (test); Precision@1: 30.8.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00832>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.00832.pdf>)