Expressing DL-Lite Ontologies with Controlled English

In this paper we deal with the problem of providing natural language front-ends to databases upon which an ontology layer has been added. Specifically, we are interested in expressing ontologies formalized in Description Logics in a controlled language, i.e., a fragment of natural language tailored to compositionally translate into a knowledge representation (KR) language. As KR language we have chosen DL-LiteR, a representative of the well-known DL-Lite family, and we aim at understanding the kind of English constructs the controlled language can and cannot have to correspond to DL-LiteR. Hence, we compare the expressive power of DL-LiteR to that of various fragments of English studied by I. Pratt and A. Third, which compositionally translate into fragments of first order logic. Our analysis shows that DL-LiteR, though polynomial, is incomparable in expressive power with respect to intractable fragments of English. Interestingly, it allows one to represent a restricted form of relat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DLOG
• Authors: Raffaella Bernardi, Diego Calvanese, Camilo Thorne
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Controlled Language, DLOG 2007, Natural Language, Natural Language Front-ends