Semantic Web Dog Food

Presented at: 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2008)

by Valentin Tablan, Danica Damljanovic, Kalina Bontcheva

Accessing structured data such as that encoded in ontologies and knowledge bases can be done using either syntactically complex formal query languages like SPARQL or complicated form interfaces that require expensive customisation to each particular application domain. This paper presents the QuestIO system { a natural language interface for accessing structured information, that is domain independent and easy to use without training. It aims to bring the simplicity of Google's search interface to conceptual retrieval by automatically converting short conceptual queries into formal ones, which can then be executed against any semantic repository. QuestIO was developed specifically to be robust with regard to language ambiguities, incomplete or syntactically ill-formed queries, by harnessing the structure of ontologies, fuzzy string matching, and ontology-motivated similarity metrics.

Keywords: conceptual search, human language technologies, querying, searching, user interfaces, Natural language processing, Natural Language Processing, NLP, Ontology (computer science), Ontology (Computer Science), SPARQL, Search Engine, Semantic Web, User Interface, Web Ontology Language

Resource URI on the dog food server: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2008/paper/199
Same as: http://revyu.com/things/eswc-2008-paper-a-natural-information
Same as: http://semanticweb.org/id/A_Natural_Language_Query_Interface_to_Structured_Information

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