A portable natural language interface to Arabic ontologies

Abstract

With the growing expansion of the semantic web and its applications, providing natural language interfaces (NLI) to end-users becomes essential to querying RDF stores and ontologies, using simple questions expressed in natural language. Existing NLIs work mostly with the English language. There are very few attempts to develop systems supporting the Arabic language. In this paper, we propose a portable NLI to Arabic ontologies; it will transform the user's query expressed in Arabic into formal language query. The proposed system starts by a preparation phase that creates a gazetteer from the given ontology. The issued query is then processed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract keywords. These keywords are mapped to the ontology entities, then a valid SPARQL query is generated based on the ontology definition and the reasoning capabilities of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). To evaluate our tool we used two different Arabic ontologies: a Qur'anic ontology and an Arabic sample of Mooney Geography dataset. The proposed system achieved 64% recall and 76% precision.