A general approach is presented for building transportable natural language interfaces for question answering systems based on a KL-ONE-like knowledge representation. An example system is described. The YAKS knowledge representation of concepts and relations is annotated with minimal syntactic information to generate a semantic case frame grammar with inheritance of cases. The generated grammar directs a case frame parser, which processes written input into instantiated case frames. These instantiations are easily translated into knowledge base queries. The same method is applicable to other object-oriented knowledge bases and other parsing techniques. The key property aimed for with this approach was cost-effective knowledge acquisition for the natural language interface. This property was achieved by basically exploiting as much as possible the knowledge about syntactic and semantic constraints that is implicit in the knowledge base. The limitations of both the current system and the approach in general are discussed. The approach is compared to related work.
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