Natural Language Understanding API [closed]

Question

I am unaware if such an API or service exists currently so this is a vague question, my apologies.

I have a PHP script that works with Freebase and I was wondering if I can enable it so a user can ask a question on my site which will be deconstructed using natural language processing, query the Freebase API and then return an answer.

Does anyone know of an already existing tool like this that works with Freebase?

If not, does anyone know of any great Natural Language Understanding APIs that would be able to strip down a question such as "how tall is mount everest?" and tell my script to query "height" on the mount everest article on Freebase?

Answer 1

This is a great question. Natural language understanding is a difficult problem and there aren't a lot of drop-in solutions out there. The problem that you've described (eg. "How tall is Mount Everest?") is actually better known as question answering.

Here is some research into question answering that used Freebase data including IBM's Watson computer: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/585641/freebase/papers/added/0/tag/question+answering/

Here are some templates in Freebase that map Freebase properties to English sentences: https://www.freebase.com/base/natlang/predicate_relation?instances

Here is a simple open source app that I built which does some basic question answering using the Freebase APIs: http://answers.freebaseapps.com/?q=what+is+the+elevation+of+mount+everest

The Quepy project uses Python to do question answering using either DBpedia or Freebase data.

Please let us know what else you discover, there's certainly a lot more that we could be doing in this area.

Answer 2

Quick update: The Quepy release is ready! :D Currently Quepy provides support for Sparql and MQL query languages. We plan to extended it to other database query languages.

The full code here: http://github.com/machinalis/quepy

Full documentation here: http://quepy.readthedocs.org/

Demo: http://quepy.machinalis.com/