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Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web pp 211–226Cite as

Multilingual Natural Language Interaction with Semantic Web Knowledge Bases and Linked Open Data

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Abstract

This chapter presents a novel approach to Semantic Web technologies with the cultural heritage domain as a use case. Semantic Web technologies offer the technological backbone to meet the requirement of integrating heterogeneous data, but they are still more adapted to be consumed by computers rather than by humans. This chapter describes a method that allows interaction with semantic knowledge bases in natural language . The proposed method enables querying a semantic repository in natural language and obtaining results from it as a coherent text. The solution involves a conversion from natural language to SPARQL on one hand and from a set of Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples to coherent natural language descriptions in multiple languages on the other. The conversions are implemented in the Grammatical Framework (GF) . The semantic knowledge infrastructure in RDF is based on OWLIM-SE and the data integration method reason-able view supplied with an ontological reference layer. The latter is connected via formal rules to a semantic representation layer and to a syntactic representation layer using GF. The resulting demonstration is a system that supports querying and text generation in 15 languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://linkeddata.org.

  2. 2.

    http://dbpedia.org.

  3. 3.

    http://www.cidoc-crm.org/.

  4. 4.

    http://spraakdata.gu.se/svedd/painting-ontology/painting.owl.

  5. 5.

    http://europeana.ontotext.com.

  6. 6.

    http://www.ontotext.com/owlim.

  7. 7.

    http://www.grammaticalframework.org/.

  8. 8.

    The $n stands for new line identifier for the back end to post-process.

  9. 9.

    The MRV with the described natural language interface is available from http://museum.ontotext.com.

  10. 10.

    The semantic data can be also extracted in JSON and XML formats.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by MOLTO European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement FP7-ICT-247914. We are grateful to the anonymous referees for helpful and detailed comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ontotext, AD, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Mariana Damova & Maria Mateva

  2. University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

    Dana Dannélls, Ramona Enache & Aarne Ranta

Authors
  1. Mariana Damova
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  2. Dana Dannélls
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  3. Ramona Enache
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  4. Maria Mateva
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  5. Aarne Ranta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mariana Damova .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philipp Cimiano

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Damova, M., Dannélls, D., Enache, R., Mateva, M., Ranta, A. (2014). Multilingual Natural Language Interaction with Semantic Web Knowledge Bases and Linked Open Data. In: Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P. (eds) Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_13

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