We are very pleased to announce that our paper “AskNow: A Framework for Natural Language Query Formalization in SPARQL” by Mohnish Dubey, Sourish Dasgupta, Ankit Sharma, Konrad Höffner, Jens Lehmann has been elected as the Paper of the month at Fraunhofer IAIS. This award is given to publications that have a high innovation impact in the research field after a committee evaluation.
This research paper has been accepted on ESWC 2016 main conference and its core work of Natural Language Query Formalization in SPARQL is based on AskNow Project.
Abstract: Natural Language Query Formalization involves semantically parsing queries in natural language and translating them into their corresponding formal representations. It is a key component for developing question-answering (QA) systems on RDF data. The chosen formal representation language in this case is often SPARQL. In this paper, we propose a framework, called AskNow, where users can pose queries in English to a target RDF knowledge base (e.g. DBpedia), which are first normalized into an intermediary canonical syntactic form, called Normalized Query Structure (NQS), and then translated into SPARQL queries. NQS facilitates the identification of the desire (or expected output information) and the user-provided input information, and establishing their mutual semantic relationship. At the same time, it is sufficiently adaptive to query paraphrasing. We have empirically evaluated the framework with respect to the syntactic robustness of NQS and semantic accuracy of the SPARQL translator on standard benchmark datasets.
The paper and authors were honored for this publication in a special event at Fraunhofer Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany.