Accommodating prepositional phrases in a highly modular natural language query interface to semantic web triplestores using a novel event-based denotational semantics for English and a set of functional parser combinators

The SemanticWeb is an emerging component of the set of technologies that will be known as Web 3.0 in the future. With the large changes it brings to how information is stored and represented to users, there is a need to re-evaluate how this information can be queried. Specifically, there is a need for Natural Language Interfaces that allow users to easily query for information on the Semantic Web. While there has been previous work in this area, existing solutions suffer from the problem that they do not support prepositional phrases in queries (e.g, “in 1958” or “with a key”). To achieve this, we improve on an existing semantics for event-based triplestores that supports prepositional phrases and demonstrate a novel method of handling the word “by”, treating it directly as a preposition in queries. We then show how this new semantics can be integrated with a parser constructed as an executable attribute grammar to create a highly modular and extensible Natural Language Interface to the Semantic Web that supports prepositional phrases in queries

Accommodating Complex Chained Prepositional Phrases in Natural Language Query Interface to an Event-Based Triplestore

Building Natural language query interfaces (NLI) to databases is one the most interesting and challenging fields of study for computer scientists and researchers. There have been many advancements and achievements in this area that enables NLIs to operate more efficiently and have wide NL coverage. However, there exists some shortcomings in query interface to semantic web triplestores. Some researchers have attempted to extend the range of queries that can be answered. However, only a few techniques can handle queries containing complex chained prepositional phrases. This thesis involves extending an existing method that can accommodate prepositional phrases to also be able to handle when..., where..., and with what... type queries. The approach developed is implemented in the Miranda programing environment

Emerging trends proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics: TPHOLs 2004

technical reportThis volume constitutes the proceedings of the Emerging Trends track of the 17th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLs 2004) held September 14-17, 2004 in Park City, Utah, USA. The TPHOLs conference covers all aspects of theorem proving in higher order logics as well as related topics in theorem proving and verification. There were 42 papers submitted to TPHOLs 2004 in the full research cate- gory, each of which was refereed by at least 3 reviewers selected by the program committee. Of these submissions, 21 were accepted for presentation at the con- ference and publication in volume 3223 of Springer?s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In keeping with longstanding tradition, TPHOLs 2004 also offered a venue for the presentation of work in progress, where researchers invite discussion by means of a brief introductory talk and then discuss their work at a poster session. The work-in-progress papers are held in this volume, which is published as a 2004 technical report of the School of Computing at the University of Utah

POLIS: a probabilistic summarisation logic for structured documents

PhDAs the availability of structured documents, formatted in markup languages such as SGML, RDF, or XML, increases, retrieval systems increasingly focus on the retrieval of document-elements, rather than entire documents. Additionally, abstraction layers in the form of formalised retrieval logics have allowed developers to include search facilities into numerous applications, without the need of having detailed knowledge of retrieval models. Although automatic document summarisation has been recognised as a useful tool for reducing the workload of information system users, very few such abstraction layers have been developed for the task of automatic document summarisation. This thesis describes the development of an abstraction logic for summarisation, called POLIS, which provides users (such as developers or knowledge engineers) with a high-level access to summarisation facilities. Furthermore, POLIS allows users to exploit the hierarchical information provided by structured documents. The development of POLIS is carried out in a step-by-step way. We start by defining a series of probabilistic summarisation models, which provide weights to document-elements at a user selected level. These summarisation models are those accessible through POLIS. The formal definition of POLIS is performed in three steps. We start by providing a syntax for POLIS, through which users/knowledge engineers interact with the logic. This is followed by a definition of the logics semantics. Finally, we provide details of an implementation of POLIS. The final chapters of this dissertation are concerned with the evaluation of POLIS, which is conducted in two stages. Firstly, we evaluate the performance of the summarisation models by applying POLIS to two test collections, the DUC AQUAINT corpus, and the INEX IEEE corpus. This is followed by application scenarios for POLIS, in which we discuss how POLIS can be used in specific IR tasks

Query Lifting: Language-integrated query for heterogeneous nested collections

Language-integrated query based on comprehension syntax is a powerful technique for safe database programming, and provides a basis for advanced techniques such as query shredding or query flattening that allow efficient programming with complex nested collections. However, the foundations of these techniques are lacking: although SQL, the most widely-used database query language, supports heterogeneous queries that mix set and multiset semantics, these important capabilities are not supported by known correctness results or implementations that assume homogeneous collections. In this paper we study language-integrated query for a heterogeneous query language $NRC_\lambda(Set,Bag)$ that combines set and multiset constructs. We show how to normalize and translate queries to SQL, and develop a novel approach to querying heterogeneous nested collections, based on the insight that ``local'' query subexpressions that calculate nested subcollections can be ``lifted'' to the top level analogously to lambda-lifting for local function definitions.Comment: Full version of ESOP 2021 conference pape