Ontology-based natural language query processing for the biological domain

Abstract

This paper describes a natural language query engine that enables users to search for entities, relationships, and events that are extracted from biological literature. The query interpretation is guided by a domain ontology, which provides a mapping between linguistic structures and domain conceptual relations. We focus on the usability of the natural language interface to users who are used to keywordbased information retrieval. Preliminary evaluation of our approach using the GENIA corpus and ontology shows promising results.