From Natural Language to Databases via Ontologies

Leonardo Lesmo, Livio Robaldo


Abstract
This paper describes an approach to Natural Language access to databases based on ontologies. Their role is to make the central part of the translation process independent both of the specific language and of the particular database schema. The input sentence is parsed and the parse tree is semantically annotated via references to the ontology describing the application. This first step is, of course, language dependent: the parsing process depends on the syntax of the language and the annotation depends on the meaning of words, expressed as links between words and concepts in the ontology. Then, the annotated tree is used to produce an “ontological query”, i.e. a query expressed in terms of paths on the ontology. This second step is entirely language- and DB-independent. Finally, the ontological query is translated into a standard SQL query, on the basis of a concept-to-DB mapping, specifying how each concept and relation is mapped onto the database.
Anthology ID:
L06-1461
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/740_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonardo Lesmo and Livio Robaldo. 2006. From Natural Language to Databases via Ontologies. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
From Natural Language to Databases via Ontologies (Lesmo & Robaldo, LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/740_pdf.pdf