Mind the cultural gap: bridging language specific DBpedia chapters for question answering

In order to publish information extracted from language-specific pages of Wikipedia in a structured way, the Semantic Web community has started an effort of internationalization of DBpedia. Language-specific DBpedia chapters can contain very different information from one language to another; in particular, they provide more details on certain topics or fill information gaps. Language-specific DBpedia chapters are well connected through instance interlinking, extracted from Wikipedia. An alignment between properties is also carried out by DBpedia contributors as a mapping from the terms in Wikipedia to a common ontology, enabling the exploitation of information coming from language-specific DBpedia chapters. However, the mapping process is currently incomplete, it is time-consuming as it is performed manually, and it may lead to the introduction of redundant terms in the ontology. In this chapte, we first propose an approach to automatically extend the existing alignments, and we then present an extension of QAKiS, a system for Question Answering over Linked Data that allows to query language-specific DBpedia chapters relying on the abovementioned property alignment. In the current version of QAKiS, English, French, and German DBpedia chapters are queried using a natural language interface.