An Open Question Answering Framework

Question answering systems are currently regarded as one of the key technologies to empower lay users to access the Web of Data. Nevertheless, they still pose hard and yet unsolved research challenges. Additionally, developing and evaluating question answering systems to address those challenges is a very complex task. We present openQA, a modular open-source platform that allows developing and evaluating question answering systems. We show the different interfaces implemented by openQA as well as the different processing steps from a question to the corresponding answer. We demonstrate how openQA can be used to implement, integrate, evaluate and instantiate question answering systems easily by combining two state-of-the-art question answering approaches.