Resolving Quantifier and Number Restriction to Question OWL Ontologies

This paper describes an approach to resolve quantifiers and number restrictions in natural language questions to query ontologies. Incorporating this feature enables natural language query interfaces to capture a wider range of user queries. To deal with quantifiers and number restrictions, we analyzed a corpus of such questions and derived constraints at the syntactic level to recognize and parse them. The approach was implemented and evaluated through a system called ONLI⁺. Our method has been evaluated by conducting different experiments using the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) measure. Experimental results show that this feature has been incorporated into ONLI⁺ without degrading its performance in terms of transforming natural language queries into the nRQL queries, but definitely increases the expressivity of the user. To the best of our knowledge no other natural language interface to query ontologies can deal with quantifiers and number restrictions.