A New Approach for Processing Natural-Language Queries to Semantic Web Triplestores

摘要

Natural Language Query Interfaces (NLQIs) have once again captured the public imagination, but developing them for the Semantic Web has proven to be non-trivial. This is unfortunate, because the Semantic Web offers many opportunities for interacting with smart devices, including those connected to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we present an NLQI to the Semantic Web based on a Compositional Semantics (CS) that can accommodate many particularly tricky aspects of the English language, including nested n-ary transitive verbs, superlatives, and chained prepositional phrases, and even ambiguity. Key to our approach is a new data structure which has proven to be useful in answering NL queries. As a consequence of this, our system is able to handle NL features that are often considered to be non-compositional. We also present a novel method to memoize sub-expressions of a query formed from CS, drastically improving query execution times with respect to large triple-stores. Our approach is agnostic to any particular database query language. A live demonstration of our NLQI is available online.