Introduction:

Since the dawn of large scale structured knowledge bases (KBs), question answering (QA) has emerged as one of the most prevalent approaches for accessing the stored knowledge. My research focuses on making KBs more accessible to the end-user via QA, enhanced with textual evidence originating from unstructured sources. Moreover, increasing amount of attention will be paid to mixed initiative search; namely, when the system can also ask questions instead of just answering. 

Furthermore, as part of the SAFEMODE project (that works on aviation and maritime safety) I will apply the techniques resulting from the aforementioned work, in an aviation safety scenario. KBs in the aviation domain are trying to capture human performance in safety-relevant tasks, and the influence of contextual conditions. Hence, QA on such KBs aims to assist the incident/accident investigation to capture the essentials and what matters, and explain these in terms that can be useful to designers and safety assessors.