A natural language query interface to structured information

  • Authors:
  • Valentin Tablan;Danica Damljanovic;Kalina Bontcheva

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

  • Venue:
  • ESWC'08 Proceedings of the 5th European semantic web conference on The semantic web: research and applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

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 robustwith regard to language ambiguities, incomplete or syntactically ill-formed queries, by harnessing the structure of ontologies, fuzzy stringmatching, and ontology-motivated similarity metrics.