Re: sentence in NLP to ontology query?

I can give you three data points from my own personal experience.

1. I have abandoned the quest for natural language, and invented
my own knowledge representation language, MKR, which is 
sufficiently English-like that non-experts can use it as an interface.
Queries are expressed in MKR, and executed by my MKE program.
My MKE program can translate MKR to/from OWL.

2. OpenCyc intends to have an English interface to their KB, but
they haven't reached their goal as yet.  They are currently working
on an OWL interface to the KB.  
OpenCyc has a primitive CycL-to-English generator operational.
They have no English-to-CycL translator.  
They do have a "dictionary assistant" which uses WordNet 
to guide the user in translating from English to the corresponding 
CycL concept.  (I haven't used the dictionary assistant yet, 
that's on my to-do list.)  OpenCyc also has a KB browser which 
searches for matching CycL concepts, which is very useful.  
In this case, it is the human who is translating from English to CycL.

3. There are numerous researchers working on KB systems
which use English as the knowledge representation language.
In this scenario, there is no translation required.

Dick McCullough
knowledge := man do identify od existent done;
knowledge haspart proposition list;
http://rhm.cdepot.net/
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Xavier Noria" <fxn@hashref.com>
To: <semantic-web@w3.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 2:17 PM
Subject: sentence in NLP to ontology query?


> 
> I have seen in several places those questions in natural language  
> that are said to be addressable with, say, the expressiveness and  
> logic properties of OWL DL. For instance the OWL Guide starts with
> 
>     Tell me what wines I should buy to serve with each course
>     of the following menu. And, by the way, I don't like Sauternes.
> 
> However, I have never seen an algorithm mentioned, nor even a  
> description of some approach, for how the translation from natural  
> language to some query language can be automated. Whether some  
> constraints have to be assumed in the natural language interface,  
> whether it is even possible or not such a translation, etc.
> 
> Are there any pointers that can help me get the picture? Which is the  
> state of the art? Or do people always mean the translation as of  
> today has to be done by a person?
> 
> -- fxn
> 
> PS: I think the OWL Guide may say at the end something about this,  
> because it starts that way and then it does not make clear it is only  
> going to present a formal and thus partial solution to the problem.  
> You end up wondering about the size of the hole between what you have  
> actually read and the solution to the original opening problem.
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 24 October 2005 03:40:10 UTC