Expressing DL-Lite Ontologies with Controlled English

Proc. of the 20th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL). Volume 250 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2007.

In this paper we deal with the problem of providing natural language front-ends to databases upon which an ontology layer has been added. Specifically, we are interested in expressing ontologies formalized in Description Logics in a controlled language, i.e., a fragment of natural language tailored to compositionally translate into a knowledge representation (KR) language. As KR language we have chosen DL-LiteR , a representative of the well-known DL-Lite family, and we aim at understanding the kind of English constructs the controlled language can and cannot have to correspond to DL-LiteR . Hence, we compare the expressive power of DL-LiteR to that of various fragments of English studied by I. Pratt and A. Third, which compositionally translate into fragments of first order logic. Our analysis shows that DL-LiteR , though itself tractable, is incomparable in expressive power with respect to tractable fragments of English. Interestingly, it allows one to represent a restricted form of relative clauses, which lead to intractability when used without restrictions on the occurrences of negations, and existential quantifiers.

@inproceedings{DL-2007-nl-dl,
   title = "Expressing DL-Lite  Ontologies with Controlled English",
   year = "2007",
   author = "Raffaella Bernardi and Diego Calvanese and Camilo Thorne",
   booktitle = "Proc. of the 20th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL)",
   pages = "195--202",
   volume = "250",
   publisher = "https://ceur-ws.org/CEUR-WS.org",
   series = "CEUR Workshop Proceedings",
}