Abstract
In the context of the development of a virtual tutor to support distance learning courses, this paper presents an approach to solve the problem of automatically answering questions posed by students in a natural language (Portuguese). Our approach is based on three main pillars: an ontology, a conversion process, and a querying process. First, the ontology, was built to model the knowledge regarding all aspects of the course; second, we defined a way of converting a natural language question to a SPARQL query; finally, the SPARQL query is executed and the result extracted from the ontology. Focusing on the second pillar mentioned above (the conversion of a NL question), we explain the whole process and present the results regarding a set of preliminary experiments.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by UID/MULTI/04046/2013 centre grant from FCT, Portugal (to BioISI – Biosystems & Integrative Sciences Institute) and by PTDC/IVC-PEC/3963/2014 project grant (VIRTUAL TUTORING the virtual tutor as learning mediating artifact in online university education) also from FCT. We would also like to thank our colleagues from the NLX (http://nlx.di.fc.ul.pt/) research group, for their support on using the dependency parser service.
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Salgueiro, A.M., Alves, C.B., Balsa, J. (2018). Querying an Ontology Using Natural Language. In: Villavicencio, A., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_17
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