Speaker
Affilliation
Aberdeen
Abstract
Knowledge engineers, domain experts and also casual users need better ways to compare and understand ontologies. As ontologies get more logically complex, the idea of presenting parts of them in natural language is becoming increasingly attractive.
This work takes as its starting point the task of answering in natural language a question ``What is A?'', where A (the target) is an atomic concept mentioned in some given OWL DL ontology. Rather than considering detailed linguistic aspects of this task, however, we focus on how to support it with appropriate reasoning.
A first attempt at the task of answering ``What is A?'' might somehow render in natural language the set of ontology axioms that mention A. However, we show that the raw axioms may well not package information in a way appropriate for natural language presentation. This seems that actually what is required is to present certain logical consequences of the axioms, where these are selected using principles of natural language presentability. Unfortunately, existing description logic reasoning services are not flexible enough for this.
We introduce a method of generating subsumers of a target concept which exploits standard DL reasoning and uses natural language principles to prune the search space. This gives an initial implementation of the idea of ``natural language directed inference''. It also introduces a number of interesting cases that shed light in logical terms on the nature of natural language presentability.
[Joint work with Jeff Pan and Xiantang Sun]