Viewing the Web as a Virtual Database for Question Answering.
Boris Katz, Sue Felshin, Jimmy Lin, Gregory A. Marton · 2004
Although the World Wide Web contains a tremendous amount of information, the lack of intuitive information access methods and the paucity of uniform structure make finding the right knowledge difficult. Our solution is to turn the Web into a “virtual database” and to access it through natural language. We have accomplished this by developing a stylized relational framework, called the object-property-value model, which captures the regularity found in both natural language questions and Web resources. We have adopted this framework in START and Omnibase, two components of a system that understands natural language questions and responds with answers extracted on the fly from heterogeneous and semistructured Web sources. Our system can answer millions of questions from hundreds of Web resources with high precision.