[Corpora-List] (New book) Cimiano etal: Ontology-Based Interpretation of Natural Language

[Graeme Hirst]

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Ontology-Based Interpretation of Natural Language

by Philipp Cimiano, Christina Unger, and John McCrae
(Semantic Computing Group, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany)


Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies #24 (Morgan &
Claypool Publishers), 2014, 178 pages

ABSTRACT:

For humans, understanding a natural language sentence or discourse is
so effortless that we hardly ever think about it. For machines,
however, the task of interpreting natural language, especially
grasping meaning beyond the literal content, has proven extremely
difficult and requires a large amount of background knowledge. This
book focuses on the interpretation of natural language with respect
to specific domain knowledge captured in ontologies. The main
contribution is an approach that puts ontologies at the center of the
interpretation process. This means that ontologies not only provide a
formalization of domain knowledge necessary for interpretation but
also support and guide the construction of meaning representations.

We start with an introduction to ontologies and demonstrate how
linguistic information can be attached to them by means of the
ontology lexicon model lemon. These lexica then serve as basis for
the automatic generation of grammars, which we use to compositionally
construct meaning representations that conform with the vocabulary of
an underlying ontology. As a result, the level of representational
granularity is not driven by language but by the semantic
distinctions made in the underlying ontology and thus by distinctions
that are relevant in the context of a particular domain. We highlight
some of the challenges involved in the construction of ontology-based
meaning representations, and show how ontologies can be exploited for
ambiguity resolution and the interpretation of temporal expressions.
Finally, we present a question answering system that combines all
tools and techniques introduced throughout the book in a real-world
application, and sketch how the presented approach can scale to
larger, multi-domain scenarios in the context of the Semantic Web.

Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments /
Introduction / Ontologies / Linguistic Formalisms / Ontology Lexica /
Grammar Generation / Putting Everything Together / Ontological
Reasoning for Ambiguity Resolution / Temporal Interpretation /
Ontology-Based Interpretation for Question Answering / Conclusion /
Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

http://dx.doi.org/10.2200/S00561ED1V01Y201401HLT024


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