QAST: question answering system for Thai Wikipedia

We propose an open-domain question answering system using Thai Wikipedia as the knowledge base. Two types of information are used for answering a question: (1) structured information extracted and stored in the form of Resource Description Framework (RDF), and (2) unstructured texts stored as a search index. For the structured information, SPARQL transformed query is applied to retrieve a short answer from the RDF base. For the unstructured information, keyword-based query is used to retrieve the shortest text span containing the questions's key terms. From the experimental results, the system which integrates both approaches could achieve an average MRR of 0.47 based on 215 test questions.