Using Selectional Restrictions to Query an OWL Ontology

Leila Kosseim, Reda Siblini, Christopher Baker and Sabine Bergler

International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006

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Abstract

The query of knowledge representation formalisms such as ontologies is a central requirement of the Semantic Web. Increasingly we are forced to recognize the importance of providing simple query access to such knowledge repositories. Existing tools that allow users to query and reason over ontologies use custom designed query languages with complex syntaxes which are reportedly difficult for domain experts to master.

This paper discusses the development of an Ontology Natural Language Interaction System, called Onli, based on semantic restrictions. The system takes as input questions in unrestricted natural language, translates them into nRQL, an extension to the Racer ontology query language, then generates answers as retrieved by the Racer ontology reasoning server. The linguistic analysis of the questions is based on a syntactic parse from which a set of predicate structures is extracted, then to map these terms to the correct ontology entities, semantic restrictions imposed by the ontology structure are applied.

The system was evaluated on the FungalWeb ontology using the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) measure used in question-answering. With a test set of 36 questions, the system achieved an MRR of 0.72.

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