Controlled Natural Language for User Interfaces on the Semantic Web

Date: March 20, 2015

Speaker: Tobias Kuhn

Abstract

In this presentation, I will talk about the use of restricted subsets of natural language to build intuitive yet powerful and precise user interfaces for the Semantic Web. I will present a wiki system called AceWiki, which allows for automated reasoning on seemingly natural texts. In addition, I will show a multilingual extension of AceWiki that applies high-quality rule-based machine translation for real-time read and write access of the wiki content in different languages. I will also talk about controlled natural languages in a broader context, introduce different types of languages and application scenarios, and present a general classification scheme to shed light on their fundamental nature.

References

The following two articles give an overview of the presented work on Semantic Web approaches:

• Kaarel Kaljurand, Tobias Kuhn, and Laura Canedo. Collaborative multilingual knowledge management based on controlled natural language. Semantic Web 6(3), 2015. http://semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj524.pdf
• Tobias Kuhn. The Understandability of OWL Statements in Controlled English. Semantic Web, 4(1), 2013. http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/pubs/papers/kuhn2013swj.pdf

The following survey article covers the work on the general properties of controlled natural languages:

• Tobias Kuhn. A Survey and Classification of Controlled Natural Languages. Computational Linguistics, 40(1), 2014. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COLI_a_00168

Presentation: Slides are available here.

Bio

Tobias Kuhn is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in the Computational Social Science group. His research areas include the Semantic Web, complex systems, user interfaces, computational linguistics, and information systems. He received his PhD at the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Zurich in 2010 for his dissertation on controlled English and knowledge representation. He was also a guest researcher in a software engineering group at the University of Chile, lecturer and researcher at the Intelligent Computer Systems Department of the University of Malta, and postdoctoral associate at Yale University in a bioinformatics lab. Among other topics, he has worked on nanopublications, semantic publishing, controlled natural languages, semantic wikis, citation network analyses, and query interfaces.