Ontology based question answering system for Sri Lankan online school education

Abstract

Today, distance education is one of the world’s most popular forms of education, and there are several opportunities for students to receive education online. Here, ontology can be considered one of the leading knowledge representation ways in e-learning systems. This research addressed students’ learning difficulties in Sri Lankan online education during the past two years. Students had to learn from home via online video conferences or audio series taught by teachers. However, students could not learn by asking questions or referring to the library materials to improve their self-studying knowledge. To overcome this issue, this research developed an ontology for school children in Sri Lanka, focusing on their IT syllabus and improving their self-education knowledge. This aims to provide personalized content while improving information searching. Students can ask questions from UI, and questions are taken as an input parameter and generate a query while cleansing for matching processes. Answers are generated by connecting to the index database and ontology repository, and the end output is displayed in the user interface. In the evaluation, it was targeted to categorize the questions according to relevant components, and the research shows the questions that are categorized into relevant categories while enhancing the performance.