Development and alignment of a domain-specific ontology for question answering

With the appearance of Semantic Web technologies, it becomes possible to develop novel, sophisticated question answering systems, where ontologies are usually used as the core knowledge component. In the EU-funded project, QALL-ME, a domain-specific ontology was developed and applied for question answering in the domain of tourism, along with the assistance of two upper ontologies for concept expansion and reasoning. This paper focuses on the development of the QALL-ME ontology in the tourism domain and its alignment with the upper ontologies – WordNet and SUMO. The design of the ontology is presented in the paper, and a semi-automatic alignment procedure is described with some alignment results given as well. Furthermore, the aligned ontology was used to semantically annotate original data obtained from the tourism web sites and natural language questions. The storage schema of the annotated data and the data access method for retrieving answers from the annotated data are also reported in the paper. 1