A framework for ontology-based question answering with application to parasite immunology

摘要

Background Large quantities of biomedical data are being produced at a rapid pace for a variety of organisms. With ontologies proliferating, data is increasingly being stored using the RDF data model and queried using RDF based querying languages. While existing systems facilitate the querying in various ways, the scientist must map the question in his or her mind to the interface used by the systems. The field of natural language processing has long investigated the challenges of designing natural language based retrieval systems. Recent efforts seek to bring the ability to pose natural language questions to RDF data querying systems while leveraging the associated ontologies. These analyze the input question and extract triples (subject, relationship, object), if possible, mapping them to RDF triples in the data. However, in the biomedical context, relationships between entities are not always explicit in the question and these are often complex involving many intermediate concepts.