Development of semantic web application architecture for natural language based querying

Abstract

With the developing technology and increased demand on practical usage of knowledge users require to interact with systems by using natural language. Researchers discover the necessity of natural language queries should be converted to machine understandable format to meet the requirement of users. The necessity of the conversion triggered the researches on studies on question answering systems that is one of the systems mostly interact with natural language queries. For question answering systems that utilizes structural knowledge sources understanding user intention accurately consists of the processes of natural language processing representing the user intention and forming structured query to generate the answer. A technique and an architecture to convert natural language query to ontology query language by utilizing from both linguistic and semantic technologies are proposed in this study. Automatic conversion of an unstructured natural language query to a structured ontology query language SPARQL and process of producing answer over linked data are explained in the proposed technique and architecture. A different approach other than the related studies is followed in terms of defining a “Query Semantization” layer in the proposed architecture and developing a natural language aware ontology for the technique proposed. Contribution to the literature is expected by combining natural language processing technique and semantic web technologies with a different approach. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.