The OntoNL framework for natural language interface generation and a domain-specific application

Abstract

We present in this paper the design and implementation of the OntoNL Framework, a natural language interface generator for knowledge repositories, as well as a natural language system for interactions with multimedia repositories which was built using the OntoNL Framework. The system allows the users to specify natural language requests about the multimedia content with rich semantics that result to digital content delivery. We propose and evaluate a semantic relatedness measure for OWL domain ontologies that concludes to the semantic ranking of ontological, grammatically-related structures. This procedure is used to disambiguate in a particular domain of context and represent in an ontology query language, natural language expressions. The ontology query language that we use is the SPARQL. The construction of the queries is automated and also dependent on the semantic relatedness measurement of ontology concepts. We also present the results of experimentation with the system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.