NLP-Reduce: A "naive" but Domain-independent Natural Language Interface for Querying Ontologies

NLP-Reduce is a natural language query interface that allows its users to enter full English questions, sentence fragments, and keywords.  It processes queries a s bag of words and only employs a reduced set of natural language processing techniques, such as stemming and synonym expansion.

Dependencies between word or phrases in the queries are only identified by the relationships that exit between the elements in a queries knowledge base. This weakness is also its major strength, as it is completely portable and robust to ungrammatical or deficient input.

Relevant Publications

• E. Kaufmann, A. Bernstein, L. Fischer, "NLP-Reduce: A "naive" but Domain-independent Natural Language Interface for Querying Ontologies", in proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007), Innsbruck, Austria, June 2007. 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, pp. 281-294. PDF