Natural Language to Sparql

Question

I'm building a small prototype of a Movies semantic search engine based on the data of LinkedIMDB

I've defined some Query Types as an example of use cases

• search by entity name search by
• entity type
• search common features between two entities ...etc

So far I've developed a SPARQL engine that takes any type of those Queries and send the Query to the endpoint and preview the result.

The problem here is that I want to make a natural language or semi natural language interface for it in order for users to invoke those sentences using Natural language search Queries. But I don't know from where to start.

I've found some papers that are trying to extract triplets from the text but I don't feel that's the key to the solution.

Also I've found some LSA techniques to interpret Natural language search Queries but I feel it's not applicable to semantic search domain.

Any idea or resources to start reading from? Is there a best practice than the natural language interface?

Answer 1

A lot of work has been done in the field of natural languge -> SQL conversion. Maybe you should take that as a starting point and see how you can modify the available examples for SPARQL. (Also, designing a controlled natural language could make your task easier.)

Another path to explore can be this article: Supporting Domain Experts to Construct Conceptual Ontologies: A Holistic Approach published at the Journal of Web Semantics, http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/article/view/189 Even though it is about using natural language for ontology construction, the approach explained there (along with open source code) can turn into a fruitful exploration.