Has questionanswering (QA) been used with Freebase as a knowledge base?

Question

Has there been any prior work done on question answering machines using Freebase as a knowledge base? I searched for this on the web but couldn't get anything substantial. Does anyone know of any work around this area where the input is an unstructured question and the QA engine leverages Freebase to provide answers?

Answer 1

Take a look at the papers on Question Answering in our Mendeley group to see how people are using Freebase data to do question answering. There's a paper in there that covers the IBM Watson project that Tom mentions.

I also made a little question answering demo on FreebaseApps.com that you can try here:

http://answers.freebaseapps.com/?q=what+is+the+population+of+paris

Answer 2

This doesn't sound like a programming question, but IBM's Jeopardy-playing Watson reportedly used Freebase (among many other sources of information) and TrueKnowledge in the UK uses it as one input.