Question Answering via Phrasal Semantic Parsing

Understanding natural language questions and converting them into structured queries have been considered as a crucial way to help users access large scale structured knowledge bases. However, the task usually involves two main challenges: recognizing users’ query intention and mapping the involved semantic items against a given knowledge base (KB). In this paper, we propose an efficient pipeline framework to model a user’s query intention as a phrase level dependency DAG which is then instantiated regarding a specific KB to construct the final structured query. Our model benefits from the efficiency of linear structured prediction models and the separation of KB-independent and KB-related modelings. We evaluate our model on two datasets, and the experimental results showed that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Free917 dataset, and, with limited training data from Free917, our model can smoothly adapt to new challenging dataset,WebQuestion, without extra training efforts while maintaining promising performances.