This paper proposes the use of ontologies representing domain and linguistic knowledge for guiding natural language (NL) communication on the Web contents. This proposal deals with the problem of obtaining and processing the Web data required to answer users queries. Concepts and communication acts are represented in a conceptual ontology (CO). Domain-restricted linguistic resources are obtained automatically by adapting the general linguistic knowledge to cover the communication acts for a particular domain. The use of domain-restricted grammars and lexicons has proved to be efficient, especially when the user is guided in introducing the sentences. To answer users queries the system fires the appropriate wrappers to extract the data from the Web. The CO provides a unifying framework to represent and process the knowledge obtained from the Web. Following this proposal, a dialogue-system for accessing a set of Web sites on the travelling domain in Spanish has been implemented.

Natural language guided dialogues for accessing the Web

Natural Language Guided Dialogues for Accessing the Web

This work, supported by the project ITEM 1 and the project BASURDE 2 and the GRUPS DE RECERCA CONSOLIDATS 3 proposes a mechanism for adapting general linguistic knowledge to applications in order to obtain automatically application-restricted NL interfaces. The knowledge involved in the process is represented in separate data structures: a conceptual ontology, a linguistic ontology, a general lexicon and a set of control rules. The general and application-dependent knowledge relevant to the communication tasks is represented in a conceptual ontology. The general linguistic information is represented in a linguistic ontology. The core of our approach consists of describing the application elements (both entities and operations) relevant to the communicative tasks in terms of the existing conceptual ontology. Lexical coverage of these elements has to be provided as well. A general basic set of control rules will then relate the application specifications to the linguistic ontology in order to obtain application-restricted NL interfaces. The system has been applied to provide NL interaction to SIREDOJ, an already existing expert system in the legal domain.

https://www.cs.upc.edu/~gatius/articles/artvex2cf1999.pdf

M. Gatius

Papers

Adapting general linguistic knowledge to applications in order to obtain friendly and efficient NL interfaces