Using Dialogues to Access Semantic Knowledge in a Web IR System

摘要

We present a dialogue system that enables the access in natural language to a web law information retrieval system. We use a semantic web language to model the document knowledge and to define an ontology representing the main classes of domain objects, their properties and their relations. Our system includes an ontology in DAML+OIL language describing the documents structure, a document database build with a subset of the Portuguese Attorney General's Office documents were each document includes a field with its semantic content described in DAML+OIL. The dialogue system interprets the user natural language sentences using the ontology, the documents semantic content and the inferred user attitudes.