Expressing DL-Lite Ontologies with Controlled English

Proc. of the 20th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2007). Volume 250 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/. 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 2007)",
   pages = "195--202",
   volume = "250",
   publisher = "CEUR-WS.org",
   series = "CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/",
}