Towards an open question answering architecture

Billions of facts pertaining to a multitude of domains are now availableon the Web as RDF data. However, accessing this data is stilla difficult endeavour for non-expert users. In order to melioratethe access to this data, approaches imposing minimal hurdles totheir users are required. Although many question answering systemsover Linked Data have being proposed, retrieving the desireddata is still significantly challenging. In addition, developing andevaluating question answering systems remains a very complex task.To overcome these obstacles, we present a modular and extensibleopen-source question answering framework. We demonstratehow the framework can be used by integrating two state-of-the-artquestion answering systems. As a result our evaluation shows thatoverall better results can be achieved by the use of combinationrather than individual stand-alone versions.