Freebase QA: Information Extraction or Semantic Parsing?

We contrast two seemingly distinct approaches to the task of question answering (QA) using Freebase: one based on information extraction techniques, the other on semantic parsing. Results over the same test-set were collected from two state-ofthe-art, open-source systems, then analyzed in consultation with those systems’ creators. We conclude that the differences between these technologies, both in task performance, and in how they get there, is not significant. This suggests that the semantic parsing community should target answering more compositional open-domain questions that are beyond the reach of more direct information extraction methods.