2018, Singh, K., Radhakrishna, A.S., Both, A., Shekarpour, S., Lytra, I., Usbeck, R., Vyas, A., Khikmatullaev, A., Punjani, D., Lange, C., Vidal, Maria-Esther, Lehmann, J., Auer, Sören

Modern question answering (QA) systems need to flexibly integrate a number of components specialised to fulfil specific tasks in a QA pipeline. Key QA tasks include Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation, Relation Extraction, and Query Building. Since a number of different software components exist that implement different strategies for each of these tasks, it is a major challenge to select and combine the most suitable components into a QA system, given the characteristics of a question. We study this optimisation problem and train classifiers, which take features of a question as input and have the goal of optimising the selection of QA components based on those features. We then devise a greedy algorithm to identify the pipelines that include the suitable components and can effectively answer the given question. We implement this model within Frankenstein, a QA framework able to select QA components and compose QA pipelines. We evaluate the effectiveness of the pipelines generated by Frankenstein using the QALD and LC-QuAD benchmarks. These results not only suggest that Frankenstein precisely solves the QA optimisation problem but also enables the automatic composition of optimised QA pipelines, which outperform the static Baseline QA pipeline. Thanks to this flexible and fully automated pipeline generation process, new QA components can be easily included in Frankenstein, thus improving the performance of the generated pipelines.

2020, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien

Answering questions on scholarly knowledge comprising text and other artifacts is a vital part of any research life cycle. Querying scholarly knowledge and retrieving suitable answers is currently hardly possible due to the following primary reason: machine inactionable, ambiguous and unstructured content in publications. We present JarvisQA, a BERT based system to answer questions on tabular views of scholarly knowledge graphs. Such tables can be found in a variety of shapes in the scholarly literature (e.g., surveys, comparisons or results). Our system can retrieve direct answers to a variety of different questions asked on tabular data in articles. Furthermore, we present a preliminary dataset of related tables and a corresponding set of natural language questions. This dataset is used as a benchmark for our system and can be reused by others. Additionally, JarvisQA is evaluated on two datasets against other baselines and shows an improvement of two to three folds in performance compared to related methods.

2023, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Singh, Kuldeep, Stocker, Markus, Both, Andreas, Auer, Sören

In the last decade, a large number of knowledge graph (KG) completion approaches were proposed. Albeit effective, these efforts are disjoint, and their collective strengths and weaknesses in effective KG completion have not been studied in the literature. We extend Plumber, a framework that brings together the research community’s disjoint efforts on KG completion. We include more components into the architecture of Plumber to comprise 40 reusable components for various KG completion subtasks, such as coreference resolution, entity linking, and relation extraction. Using these components, Plumber dynamically generates suitable knowledge extraction pipelines and offers overall 432 distinct pipelines. We study the optimization problem of choosing optimal pipelines based on input sentences. To do so, we train a transformer-based classification model that extracts contextual embeddings from the input and finds an appropriate pipeline. We study the efficacy of Plumber for extracting the KG triples using standard datasets over three KGs: DBpedia, Wikidata, and Open Research Knowledge Graph. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of Plumber in dynamically generating KG completion pipelines, outperforming all baselines agnostic of the underlying KG. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of collective failure cases, study the similarities and synergies among integrated components and discuss their limitations.