Knowledge-based Question Answering for DIYers

DIY (Do-It-Yourself) requires extensive knowledge such as the usage of tools, properties of materials, and the procedure of activities. Most DIYers use online search to find information but it is usually time-consuming and challenging for novice DIYers to understand the retrieved results and later apply them to their individual DIY tasks. In the work, we present a Question Answering (QA) system which can address the DIYers' specific needs. The core component is a knowledge base (KB) which contains a vast amount of domain knowledge encoded in a knowledge graph. The system is able to explain how the answers are derived with reasoning process. Our user study shows that the QA system addresses DIYers' needs more effectively than the web search.