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

Abstract

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