FRAQUE: a FRAme-based QUEstion-answering system for the Public Administration domain

In this paper, we propose FRAQUE, a question answering system for factoid questions in the Public Administration domain. The system is based on semantic frames, here intended as collections of slots typed with their possible values. FRAQUE is a pattern-base system that queries unstructured data, such as documents, web pages, and social media posts. Our system can exploit the potential of different approaches: it extracts pattern elements from texts which are linguistically analysed by means of statistical methods. FRAQUE allows Italian users to query vast document repositories related to the domain of Public Administration. Given the statistical nature of most of its components such as word embeddings, the system allows for a flexible domain and language adaptation process. FRAQUE’s goal is to associate questions with frames stored into a Knowledge Graph along with relevant document passages, which are returned as the answer. In order to guarantee the system usability, the implementation of FRAQUE is based on a user-centered design process, which allowed us to monitor the linguistic structures employed by users, as well as to find which terms were the most common in users’ questions.