Re: Formal Semantics of OWL + RDF + SPARQL + SWRL

Of course I agree they can be useful, and I imagine there will be a lot
more work in this direction in the future once SemWeb gets to the
"Proof" layer. Yet they can make things worse if not carefully done -
i.e. a wrong English explanation or one that doesn't capture surprising
inferences might lull us into an unwarranted sense of security. Yet
Adrian is surely right on the point that for most people, the natural
language explanation will be what counts more than anything else when
trying to verify the accuracy or provenance of a statement.

Does anyone out there have any good references on natural language
generation for the Semantic Web? I've found one workshop without online
proceedings[1] and work by Bontcheva and Wilcock.

And better yet, besides Adrian's system, are there any open-source
systems out there to generate NL from SemWeb KR?

[1] http://www.dfki.de/~neumann/ijcai2005/


Adrian Walker wrote:

> Hi Harry --
>
> At 02:25 PM 12/8/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>
>> While I appreciate Adrian's demonstrations, I'm just going to point out
>> that while phrasing things in natural language explanations will
>> clearly be useful for the semantic web, it doesn't correct - in fact it
>> makes worse - the questions of ambiguity that I think were trying to be
>> addressed by formal semantics to begin with.
>
>
> Hmm... Please remember that, underlying our demonstration system [1],
> there is a formal declarative semantics, and the inference method is
> based on proofs of soundness and completeness wrt to that [2]. On top
> of this, we add some lightweight English processing so that people can
> see what the concepts we reason with are supposed to mean in the real
> world [3].
>
> So, saying that "natural language explanations will make things worse"
> would seem to be analogous to saying "don't ever put an English
> comment in your Java program -- it will only make things ambiguous".
>
> Actually, what the system does may usefully be thought of as "making
> comments directly executable".
>
> I hope this makes some sort of sense. Thanks in advance for feedback.
>
> -- Adrian
>
> [1] Internet Business logic, online at www.reengineeringllc.com.
> Shared use is free.
>
> [2] Backchain Iteration: Towards a Practical Inference Method that is
> Simple Enough to be Proved Terminating, Sound and Complete. Journal of
> Automated Reasoning, 11:1-22.
>
> [3]
> www.reengineeringllc.com/Internet_Business_Logic_e-Government_Presentation.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
> Adrian Walker
> Reengineering
> PO Box 1412
> Bristol
> CT 06011-1412 USA
>
> Phone: USA 860 583 9677
> Cell: USA 860 830 2085
> Fax: USA 860 314 1029
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 20:45:36 UTC