The QALL-ME Framework is an architecture skeleton for multilingual question answering (QA) systems that answer questions with the help of structured answer data sources from freely specifiable domains. The language barrier is crossed with the help of a domain ontology. Provisions are made to easily anchor questions in space and time. Finding the mapping between question and answer – which is the major step in all QA systems – is done using a novel approach which is based on textual entailment recognizers. The framework is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is realized using web services.
The QALL-ME Framework is free software and comes with a set of demo components which illustrate the potential of the approach and which help new developers to get started with the framework. The framework seeks to be compliant with standards as far as possible in order to enhance interoperability and ease of use.