The WDAqua ITN: Answering Questions using Web Data
This project addresses the problem of improving question answering systems for a wide audience, including end users in various sectors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing efforts without specifying new breakthroughs.
The WDAqua ITN project aimed to advance data-driven question answering by integrating training, research, and innovation across academia and industry, with applications in e-commerce, public sector information, publishing, and smart cities. It focused on developing transferable skills and research results to benefit end users and researchers.
WDAqua is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) and is funded under EU grant number 642795 and runs from January 2015 to December 2018. WDAqua aims at advancing the state of the art by intertwining training, research and innovation efforts, centered around one service: data-driven question answering. Question answering is immediately useful to a wide audience of end users, and we will demonstrate this in settings including e-commerce, public sector information, publishing and smart cities. Question answering also covers web science and data science broadly, leading to transferrable research results and to transferrable skills of the researchers who have finished our training programme. To ensure that our research improves question answering overall, every individual research project connects at least two of these steps. Intersectional secondments (within a consortium covering academia, research institutes and industrial research as well as network-wide workshops, R and D challenges and innovation projects further balance ground-breaking research and the needs of society and industry. Training-wise these offers equip early stage researchers with the expertise and transferable technical and non-technical skills that will allow them to pursue a successful career as an academic, decision maker, practitioner or entrepreneur.