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 01:41:19 UTC