The QALL-ME Framework: A Specifiable-Domain Multilingual Question Answering Architecture.

This paper presents the QALL-ME Framework, a reusable architecture for building multilingual Question Answering (QA) systems working on structured data. The framework is released as free open source software with a set of demo components and extensive documentation. As main characteristics of the QALL-ME Framework we point out: (i) the framework domain portability, achieved by an ontology modelling of the target domain; (ii) the context awareness regarding space and time of the question; (iii) the use of textual entailment engines as the core of the question interpretation; and (iv) the framework’s Service Oriented Architecture, which is realized using interchangeable web services. Furthermore we present a running example to clarify how the framework processes questions as well as a case study that successfully shows a QA application built with the QALL-ME Framework for cinema/movie events in the tourism domain.