Ontology-based Why-Question Analysis Using Lexico-Syntactic Patterns

Abstract

This research focuses on developing a method to analyze why-questions.  Some previous researches on the why-question analysis usually used the morphological and the syntactical approach without considering the expected answer types. Moreover, they rarely involved domain ontology to capture the semantic or conceptualization of the content. Consequently, some semantic mismatches occurred and then resulting not appropriate answers. The proposed method considers the expected answer types and involves domain ontology. It adapts the simple, the bag-of-words like model, by using semantic entities (i.e., concepts/entities and relations) instead of words to represent a query. The proposed method expands the question by adding the additional semantic entities got by executing the constructed SPARQL query of the why-question over the domain ontology. The major contribution of this research is in developing an ontology-based why-question analysis method by considering the expected answer types. Some experiments have been conducted to evaluate each phase of the proposed method. The results show good performance for all performance measures used (i.e., precision, recall, undergeneration, and overgeneration). Furthermore, comparison against two baseline methods, the keyword-based ones (i.e., the term-based and the phrase-based method), shows that the proposed method obtained better performance results in terms of MRR and P@10 values.