True Knowledge: Open-Domain Question Answering Using Structured Knowledge and Inference

This article gives a detailed description of True Knowledge: a commercial, open-domain question-answering platform. The system combines a large and growing structured knowledge base of commonsense, factual, and lexical knowledge; a natural language translation system that turns user questions into internal language-independent queries; and an inference system that can answer those queries using both directly represented and inferred knowledge. The system is live and answers millions of questions per month asked by Internet users. Behind the platform is a large and growing knowledge base of the world's knowledge in structured form combining commonsense, factual, and lexical knowledge. Natural language questions are answered by first translating the question into a language-independent query and then executing the query using both knowledge in the knowledge base and additional knowledge generated by a general inference system.