Question Answering Over Knowledge Graphs: A Case Study in Tourism

Over the recent years, a large number of knowledge graphs (KGs) have been developed to store and present small and medium enterprises’ data in the form of subject-predicate-object triples. The KGs are not easily accessible to end-users because they need an understanding of query languages and KGs’ structures. To assist end-users in accessing these KGs, question answering over KGs targets to provide answers for natural language questions (NLQs). This paper proposes an approach to answer questions over small and medium scaled KGs based on graph isomorphism in two phases: (1) offline phase and (2) semantic parsing phase. In the offline phase, a semi-automated solution is proposed to generate NLQs and their answers, which are used to train machine learning models employed in the next phase. In the semantic parsing phase, a given input NLQ is mapped into a query pattern according to its grammatical structure. Each query pattern contains some slots that need to be filled with corresponding entities, classes and relations from the KG. While string and semantic similarity metrics are applied to identify the entities and classes, the probability distribution of the relations is used to extract the relations. The Cartesian product of the identified entities, classes and relations is utilized to fill the slots, derive SPARQL queries and finally retrieve the answers. To evaluate the proposed approach, we use SalzburgerLand KG, a real KG describing touristic entities of the region of Salzburg, Austria. Our results show that the approach improves the end-to-end user experience in terms of interactive question answering and performance.