Paper accepted at WWW 2017

wwwlogoWe are very pleased to announce that our group got a paper accepted for presentation at the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2017), which will be held on the sunny shores of Perth, Western Australia /3-7 April, 2017. The WWW is an important international forum for the evolution of the web, technical standards, the impact of the web on society, and its future.

Neural Network-based Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs on Word and Character Levelby Denis Lukovnikov, Asja Fischer, Soeren Auer, and Jens Lehmann.

Abstract: Question Answering (QA) systems over Knowledge Graphs (KG) automatically answer natural language questions using facts contained in a knowledge graph. Simple questions, which can be answered by the extraction of a single fact, constitute a large part of questions asked on the web but still pose challenges to QA systems, especially when asked against a large knowledge resource. Existing QA systems usually rely on various components each specialised in solving different sub-tasks of the problem (such as segmentation, entity recognition, disambiguation, and relation classification etc.). In this work, we follow a quite different approach: We train a neural network for answering simple questions in an end-to-end manner, leaving all decisions to the model. It learns to rank subject-predicate pairs to enable the retrieval of relevant facts given a question. The network contains a nested word/character-level question encoder which allows to handle out-of-vocabulary and rare word problems while still being able to exploit word-level semantics. Our approach achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art end-to-end approaches that rely on an attention mechanism.

Acknowledgments
This work is supported in part by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 Framework Program for the project WDAqua (GA 642795).

Looking forward to seeing you at WWW.