Ginseng - A Guided Input Natural Language Search Engine

Ginseng relies on a simple question grammar which gets dynamically extended by the structure of an ontology to guide users in formulating queries in a language seemingly akin to English. Basing on the grammar Ginseng then translates the queries into a Semantic Web query language (SPARQL), which allows their execution.

Ginseng is extremely simple to use without any training (as opposed to any logic-based querying approach) resulting in very good query performance. It was extended by an ontology editing function, which resulted in GINO - a Guided Input Natural Language Ontology Editor.

Relevant Publications:

• 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, pp. 281-294. PDF
  
• A. Bernstein, E. Kaufmann, "GINO - A Guided Input Natural Language Ontology Editor", in proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), Athens, Georgia, 2006, p. 144-157. PDF
  
• A. Bernstein, E. Kaufmann, C. Kaiser, C. Kiefer, "Ginseng: A Guided Input Natural Language Search Engine for Querying Ontologies", 2006 Jena User Conference, Bristol, UK, May 2006. PDF
• A. Bernstein, E. Kaufmann, C. Kaiser, "Querying the Semantic Web with Ginseng: A Guided Input Natural Language Search Engine", in proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS 2005), Las Vegas, NV, 2005, pp. 45-50. PDF