Towards an open question answering architecture

Billions of facts pertaining to a multitude of domains are now available on the Web as RDF data. However, accessing this data is still a difficult endeavour for non-expert users. In order to meliorate the access to this data, approaches imposing minimal hurdles to their users are required. Although many question answering systems over Linked Data have being proposed, retrieving the desired data is still significantly challenging. In addition, developing and evaluating question answering systems remains a very complex task. To overcome these obstacles, we present a modular and extensible open-source question answering framework. We demonstrate how the framework can be used by integrating two state-of-the-art question answering systems. As a result our evaluation shows that overall better results can be achieved by the use of combination rather than individual stand-alone versions.