Abstract: Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) is one of the key areas in artificial intelligence (AI) field. It is intended to represent the world knowledge in formal languages (e.g., Prolog, SPARQL) and then enhance the expert systems to perform querying and inference tasks. Currently, constructing large scale knowledge bases (KBs) with high quality is prohibited by the fact that the construction process requires many qualified knowledge engineers who not only understand the domain-specific knowledge but also have sufficient skills in knowledge representation. Unfortunately, qualified knowledge engineers are in short supply. Therefore, it would be very useful to build a tool that allows the user to construct and query the KB simply via text. Although there is a number of systems developed for knowledge extraction and question answering, they mainly fail in that these system don't achieve high enough accuracy whereas KRR is highly sensitive to erroneous data. In this thesis proposal, I will present Knowledge Authoring Logic Machine (KALM), a rule-based system which allows the user to author knowledge and query the KB in text. The experimental results show that KALM achieved superior accuracy in knowledge authoring and question answering as compared to the state-of-the-art systems.

Introduction: Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) is the process of representing the domain knowledge in formal languages (e.g., SPARQL, Prolog) such that it can be used by expert systems to execute querying and reasoning services. KRR have been applied in many fields including financial regulations, medical diagnosis, laws, and so on. One major obstacle in KRR is the creation of large-scale knowledge bases with high quality. For one thing, this requires the knowledge engineers (KEs) not only to have the background knowledge in a certain domain but have enough skills in knowledge representation as well. Unfortunately, qualified KEs are also in short supply. Therefore, it would be useful to build a tool that allows the domain experts without any background in logic to construct and query the knowledge base simply from text. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) BIBREF0 were developed as a technology that achieves this goal. CNLs are designed based on natural languages (NLs) but with restricted syntax and interpretation rules that determine the unique meaning of the sentence. Representative CNLs include Attempto Controlled English BIBREF1 and PENG BIBREF2 . Each CNL is developed with a language parser which translates the English sentences into an intermediate structure, discourse representation structure (DRS) BIBREF3 . Based on the DRS structure, the language parsers further translate the DRS into the corresponding logical representations, e.g., Answer Set Programming (ASP) BIBREF4 programs. One main issue with the aforementioned CNLs is that the systems do not provide enough background knowledge to preserve semantic equivalences of sentences that represent the same meaning but are expressed via different linguistic structures. For instance, the sentences Mary buys a car and Mary makes a purchase of a car are translated into different logical representations by the current CNL parsers. As a result, if the user ask a question who is a buyer of a car, these systems will fail to find the answer. In this thesis proposal, I will present KALM BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , a system for knowledge authoring and question answering. KALM is superior to the current CNL systems in that KALM has a complex frame-semantic parser which can standardize the semantics of the sentences that express the same meaning via different linguistic structures. The frame-semantic parser is built based on FrameNet BIBREF7 and BabelNet BIBREF8 where FrameNet is used to capture the meaning of the sentence and BabelNet BIBREF8 is used to disambiguate the meaning of the extracted entities from the sentence. Experiment results show that KALM achieves superior accuracy in knowledge authoring and question answering as compared to the state-of-the-art systems. The rest parts are organized as follows: Section SECREF2 discusses the related works, Section SECREF3 presents the KALM architecture, Section SECREF4 presents KALM-QA, the question answering part of KALM, Section SECREF5 shows the evaluation results, Section SECREF6 shows the future work beyond the thesis, and Section SECREF7 concludes the paper.

Question: What dataset did they evaluate on?
Answer: a manually created dataset of 50 logical frames mostly derived from FrameNet, a manually constructed general questions dataset based on the 50 logical frames and MetaQA dataset