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Querix

Querix - A Natural Language Interface to Query Ontologies Based on Clarification Dialogs

Querix is a domain-independent natural language interface (NLI) that uses clarification dialogs to query ontologies. The approach is simple and does not use any complex semantics-based technologies. Compared to a full natural language processing (NLP) engine, it does not try to resolve natural language ambiguities, but asks the user for clarification.

The user acts the role of the druid Getafix/Miraculix (hence the name Querix) who is consulted by Asterix and the other villagers whenever anything strange occurs. The person composing a query benefits from the clarification dialog by better retrieval results and, even more important, by being relieved from the cognitive burden of learning a formal query language.

The approach does not claim to be ''intelligent'' by interpreting and understanding the input queries; it employs a reduced set of NLP tools (i.e., Stamford Parser, WordNet) and consults the user when hitting its limitations. It is the simplicity, however, that makes the interface portable.

Relevant Publications:

  • E. Kaufmann, A. Bernstein, R. Zumstein, "Querix: A Natural Language Interface to Query Ontologies Based on Clarification Dialogs", in proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), Athens, GA, 2006, pp. 980-981. PDF
  • E. Kaufmann, A. Bernstein, "How Useful are Natural Language Interfaces to the Semantic Web for Casual End-users?", in proceedings of the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), Busan, Korea, 2007. PDF
The Querix interface after executing the query "What is the biggest state in the US?"
The ask box of Querix offers the possible meanings of “biggest” to the user for selection in order to resolve the ambiguity.