Skip to main content

A German Natural Language Interface for Semantic Search

  • Conference paper
Semantic Technology (JIST 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 7774))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Semantic data is the key for an efficient information retrieval. It relies on a well-defined structure and enables automated processing. Therefore, more and more ontologies are specified, extended and interlinked. By now, only the query language SPARQL provides a precise access to semantic data. Since most common users are overstrained in formulating queries, which satisfy the structure of semantic data, more search-interface approaches emerge aiming at good usability and correct answers. We implemented a Natural Language Interface (NLI), that answers questions formulated in German natural language. In order to query the domain ontology, the user query is translated into SPARQL first. Since domain-ontology resources are required for the SPARQL-query formulation, this paper introduces an approach for the identification of resources in user query. We show a path-based identification of semantically similar resources and a similarity measure. After running 100 test questions, our system achieves a precision and recall of 66%.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Antoniou, G., van Harmelen, F.: A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd edn. Cooperative Information Systems. The MIT Press (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. W3C World Wide Web Consortium: Resource Description Framework (RDF). Website, http://www.w3.org/RDF/ (visited on September 14, 2010)

  3. Bizer, C., Heath, T., Berners-Lee, T.: Linked Data – The Story So Far. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 5(3), 1–22 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Prud’hommeaux, E., Seaborne, A.: SPARQL Query Language for RDF. Website, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ (visited on September 14, 2010)

  5. Kaufmann, E., Bernstein, A.: How Useful Are Natural Language Interfaces to the Semantic Web for Casual End-Users? In: Aberer, K., Choi, K.-S., Noy, N., Allemang, D., Lee, K.-I., Nixon, L.J.B., Golbeck, J., Mika, P., Maynard, D., Mizoguchi, R., Schreiber, G., Cudré-Mauroux, P. (eds.) ISWC/ASWC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4825, pp. 281–294. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Heim, P., Ertl, T., Ziegler, J.: Facet Graphs: Complex Semantic Querying Made Easy. In: Aroyo, L., Antoniou, G., Hyvönen, E., ten Teije, A., Stuckenschmidt, H., Cabral, L., Tudorache, T. (eds.) ESWC 2010, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6088, pp. 288–302. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Damljanovic, D., Agatonovic, M., Cunningham, H.: Natural Language Interfaces to Ontologies: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-Based Lookup through the User Interaction. In: Aroyo, L., Antoniou, G., Hyvönen, E., ten Teije, A., Stuckenschmidt, H., Cabral, L., Tudorache, T. (eds.) ESWC 2010, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6088, pp. 106–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Semantic Computing Group, CITEC, Bielefeld University and the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University: Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-1), Collocated with the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Heraklion, Greece (June 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Lehmann, J., Bizer, C., Kobilarov, G., Auer, S., Becker, C., Cyganiak, R., Hellmann, S.: DBpedia - a crystallization point for the web of data. Journal of Web Semantics 7(3), 154–165 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kaufmann, E., Bernstein, B., Zumstein, R.: Querix: A natural language interface to query ontologies based on clarification dialogs. In: In: 5th ISWC, pp. 980–981. Springer (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wang, C., Xiong, M., Zhou, Q., Yu, Y.: PANTO: A Portable Natural Language Interface to Ontologies. In: Franconi, E., Kifer, M., May, W. (eds.) ESWC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4519, pp. 473–487. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Princeton University: Princeton University ’About WordNet’. Website, http://wordnet.princeton.edu (visited on November 7, 2011)

  13. University of Tübingen: GermaNet - A German Wordnet. Website, http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/GermaNet/index.shtml (visited on November 7, 2011)

  14. Rafferty, A.N., Manning, C.D.: Parsing three German treebanks: lexicalized and unlexicalized baselines. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Parsing German, PaGe 2008, pp. 40–46. Association for Computational Linguistics (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Schmid, H.: Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging with an Application to German. In: Proceedings of the ACL SIGDAT-Workshop, pp. 47–50 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ott, N.: BananaSplit - Dictionary-based Compound Splitter for German Platform. Website, http://niels.drni.de/s9y/pages/bananasplit.html (visited on February 6, 2012)

  17. Moldovan, D.I., Harabagiu, S.M., Pasca, M., Mihalcea, R., Girju, R., Goodrum, R., Rus, V.: The Structure and Performance of an Open-Domain Question Answering System. In: ACL. ACL (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Wu, Z., Das, S., Annamalai, M., Murray, C., Beauregard, B.: Oracle Semantic Technologies Inference Best Practices with RDFS/OWL. Oracle (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Kuc, R.: Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook. Packt Publishing (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Delbru, R., Toupikov, N., Catasta, M., Tummarello, G.: A Node Indexing Scheme for Web Entity Retrieval. In: Aroyo, L., Antoniou, G., Hyvönen, E., ten Teije, A., Stuckenschmidt, H., Cabral, L., Tudorache, T. (eds.) ESWC 2010, Part II. LNCS, vol. 6089, pp. 240–256. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. McCrae, J., Spohr, D., Cimiano, P.: Linking Lexical Resources and Ontologies on the Semantic Web with Lemon. In: Antoniou, G., Grobelnik, M., Simperl, E., Parsia, B., Plexousakis, D., De Leenheer, P., Pan, J. (eds.) ESWC 2011, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6643, pp. 245–259. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. Pedersen, T., Patwardhan, S., Michelizzi, J.: WordNet::Similarity: Measuring the Relatedness of Concepts. In: Proceedings of the Demonstration Papers at HLT-NAACL (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Manning, C.D., Raghavan, P., Schütze, H.: Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Cimiano, P., Haase, P., Heizmann, J.: Porting natural language interfaces between domains: an experimental user study with the orakel system. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Kübler, S., Prokic, J., Groningen, R.: Why is German dependency parsing more reliable than constituent parsing? In: Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, TLT (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Nivre, J., Hall, J., Nilsson, J., Chanev, A., Eryigit, G., Kübler, S., Marinov, S., Marsi, E.: Maltparser: A language-independent system for data-driven dependency parsing. Natural Language Engineering 13(2), 95–135 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Deines, I., Krechel, D. (2013). A German Natural Language Interface for Semantic Search. In: Takeda, H., Qu, Y., Mizoguchi, R., Kitamura, Y. (eds) Semantic Technology. JIST 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7774. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37996-3_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37996-3_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37995-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37996-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics