[DL] Mapping words or utterances (in natural language) to ontology concepts

[Uli Sattler]

H Olivier, I know that Ian Pratt-Hartman has worked on related fragments of first order logic and their correspondence in English, and that Robert Stevens has some work on translating Owl into English.

Cheers, Uli

On 13 Aug 2013, at 12:45, Olivier Austina <olivier.austina at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, 
> My question is about mapping a word or an utterance (in natural language) to ontology for Natural Language Interface to DataBase (NLIDB). The database can be an RDF graph or traditional database.
> The problem is that the lexicon derived from the ontology is very limited to cover how the natural language can express the concepts of the ontology. It is possible to enriched labels of the ontology with synonymy or hypernymy/hyponymy but it is still insufficient to cover the way natural language can refer to ontology concepts.
> 
> The first motivation is not reasoning but be able to map natural language to ontology. I think Description Logic is suitable for this task by providing  a way a word or an  utterance can be describe according a given ontology but I don't know how far it is possible to go with DL (strength and limitation of DL for this kind of task).
> 
> This an example taken from the DL handbook 2003 (p. 93) :
> 
> 
>                                 
> for a person having at least 2 sons and at most 5 daughters.
> 
> Somtimes, it is possible to have an expression or function instead of integer like 2 or 5 in this example to quantify roles or concepts. For example : A person with more than a third of her children are males. The expression or th function can be provided by a formal query language such as SQL or SPARQL or a user defined functions.
> My questions are the following:
> 
> Can DL support an arbitrary expression, function?
> What can be expressed using DL and cannot be expressed (the motivation s not reasoning but mapping natural language to ontology concept).
> 
> Any suggestion is welcome. Thanks.
> 
> Regards
> Olivier
> 
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