This work is motivated by the task of describing in natural language a concept defined in an OWL DL ontology. However, rather than focussing on linguistic issues, we address the question of how to support natural language presentation with inference. We introduce a new non-standard DL reasoning problem, that of finding subsumers of a concept that are suitable for natural language presentation. We present a solution that works by enumerating successively more complex concepts in the limited language ALEN. Although the search space is formidable, specific optimisations that take into account characteristics of natural language enable it to be tamed. Our initial experiments show that the approach may be quite feasible in practice.
Chris Mellish, Jeff Z. Pan