Important note about the Querix name

"Querix" is a registered trademark of Querix (UK) Ltd. (http://www.querix.com). The above mentioned tool/interface/publication named "Querix" was elaborated independent from Querix (UK) Ltd.

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