Semi-automatic Knowledge Base Expansion for Question Answering

In this paper we present a hybrid semi-automatic methodology for the construction of a Lexical Knowledge Base. The purpose of the work is to face the challenges related to synonymy in Question Answering systems. We talk about a “hybrid” method for two main reasons: firstly, it includes both a manual annotation process and an automatic expansion phase; secondly, the Knowledge Base data refers, a the same time, to both the syntactic and the semantic properties borrowed from the Lexicon-Grammar theoretical framework. The resulting Knowledge Base allows the automatic recognition of those nouns and adjectives which are not typically related into synonyms databases. In detail, we refer to nouns and adjectives that enter into a morph-phonological relation with verbs, in addition to the classic matching between words based on synset from the MultiWordNet synonym database.