KBQA: An Online Template Based Question Answering System over Freebase

Wanyun Cui, Yanghua Xiao, Wei Wang

Abstract: Question answering (QA) has become a popular way for humans to access billion-scale knowledge bases. QA systems over knowledge bases produce accurate and concise answers. The key of QA over knowledge bases is to map the question to a certain substructure in the knowledge base. To do this, KBQA (Question Answering over Knowledge Bases) uses a new kind of question representation: templates, learned from a million scale QA corpora. For example, for questions about a city's population, KBQA learns templates such as What's the population of city?, How many people are there in city?. It learns overall 1171303 templates for 4690 relations. Based on these templates, KBQA effectively and efficiently supports binary factoid questions or complex questions.