KMi Publications

Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-04-05 Abstract


Ontology-driven Question Answering in AquaLog
Techreport ID: kmi-04-05
Date: 2004
Author(s): Vanessa Lopez, Enrico Motta
Download PDF

The semantic web vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup is widely available, both to enable sophisticated interoperability among agents and to support human web users in locating and making sense of informa-tion. The availability of semantic markup on the web also opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontol-ogy as input and returns answers drawn from one or more knowledge bases (KBs), which instantiate the input ontology with domain-specific information. AquaLog makes use of the GATE NLP platform, string metrics algorithms, WordNet and a novel ontology-based relation similarity service to make sense of user queries with respect to the target knowledge base. Finally, although AquaLog has primarily been designed for use with semantic web languages, it makes use of a generic plug-in mechanism, which means it can be easily interfaced to different ontology servers and knowledge representation platforms.

Publication(s):

To appear in Proceedings of 9th international conference on applications of natural language to information systems, Manchester, 2004
 
KMi Publications
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.