Natural language why-question answering system in business intelligence context

—Business Intelligence is the key technologies that ensures effective decision making through extracting relevant information and providing adapted systems as the Data Warehouses. To access decisional information, the decision maker should express his requirements in Natural Language interfaces without any technical skills, avoiding the IT-Designer intervention. Often, the decision maker’s requirements are expressed as WH-questions (”What, Who, Where, etc.”) or Keyword-like questions. In this paper, we emphasize on a ”Why-Question” asked in Business Intelligence context. This question has not been well dealt in the literature in terms of produced answers. Indeed, to respond this type of question, it is necessary to provide explanations. These explanations are determined by identifying causal relationships between the phenomenon highlighted in the Why-Question and factors that can influence this phenomenon. In this context, we propose an approach on which a system can address a causality problem related to answering a decisional Why-Question. To validate our approach a tool called ”BI Why Q/A” is developed. In order evaluate our proposal in terms of efficiency and relevance, a set of experimental studies is carried out and presented.