Use of Ontologies in Practical NL Query Interpretetation
Leonardo Lesmo and Livio Robaldo
The 10th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIIA 2007)
Roma, Italy, September 10-13, 2007
Abstract
This paper describes how a domain ontology has been used in practical system of query interpretation. It presents a general methodology for building a semantic and language-independent representation of the meaning of the query on the basis of the contents of the ontology. The basic idea is to look for paths on the ontology connecting concepts related to words appearing in the NL query. The final result is what has been called Ontological Query, i.e. a semantic description of the user’s target. Since the domain is restricted, the problem of semantic ambiguity is not as relevant as in unrestricted applications, but some hints about how to obtained unambiguous representation will be given.