Semantic parsing is the process of mapping a natural language sentence into a formal representation of its meaning. In this work we use the neural network approach to transform natural language sentence into a query to an ontology database in the SPARQL language. This method does not rely on handcraft-rules, high-quality lexicons, manually-built templates or other handmade complex structures. Our approach is based on vector space model and neural networks. The proposed model is based in two learning steps. The first step generates a vector representation for the sentence in natural language and SPARQL query. The second step uses this vector representation as input to a neural network (LSTM with attention mechanism) to generate a model able to encode natural language and decode SPARQL.
The work in @cite_9 associates phrases in natural language with RDF triples, as in our approach. Through a linguistic analysis, their model extracts relations and associates them to triples. They also generate SPARQL scripts, however using first an intermediate format. Then, with the help of an ontology, a SPARQL query is generated after identifying the targets and modifiers of the query. That is developed using Arabic as the source language, however a comparison with ours can be made as both works also use information extraction from a syntactic tree.
@cite_9
2212742528
The logic-based machine-understandable framework of the Semantic Web often challenges naive users when they try to query ontology-based knowledge bases. Existing research efforts have approached this problem by introducing Natural Language (NL) interfaces to ontologies. These NL interfaces have the ability to construct SPARQL queries based on NL user queries. However, most efforts were restricted to queries expressed in English, and they often benefited from the advancement of English NLP tools. However, little research has been done to support querying the Arabic content on the Semantic Web by using NL queries. This paper presents a domain-independent approach to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL by leveraging linguistic analysis. Based on a special consideration on Noun Phrases (NPs), our approach uses a language parser to extract NPs and the relations from Arabic parse trees and match them to the underlying ontology. It then utilizes knowledge in the ontology to group NPs into triple-based representations. A SPARQL query is finally generated by extracting targets and modifiers, and interpreting them into SPARQL. The interpretation of advanced semantic features including negation, conjunctive and disjunctive modifiers is also supported. The approach was evaluated by using two datasets consisting of OWL test data and queries, and the obtained results have confirmed its feasibility to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL.