A Natural Language Query Interface to Structured Information

Accessing structured data such as that encoded in ontologies and knowledge bases can be done using either syntactically complex formal query languages like SPARQL or complicated form interfaces that require expensive customisation to each particular application domain. This paper presents the QuestIO system – a natural language interface for accessing structured information, that is domain independent and easy to use without training. It aims to bring the simplicity of Google’s search interface to conceptual retrieval by automatically converting short conceptual queries into formal ones, which can then be executed against any semantic repository. QuestIO was developed specifically to be robust with regard to language ambiguities, incomplete or syntactically ill-formed queries, by harnessing the structure of ontologies, fuzzy string matching, and ontologymotivated similarity metrics.