Generating Natural Language Descriptions from OWL Ontologies: the NaturalOWL System
This work addresses the accessibility of OWL ontology information for end-users, not just experts, by enabling automatic text generation in multiple languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing verbalization methods.
The authors tackled the problem of generating fluent, multi-sentence natural language descriptions from OWL ontologies for end-users, resulting in the NaturalOWL system that produces significantly better texts compared to simpler verbalizers when domain-dependent linguistic resources are available.
We present NaturalOWL, a natural language generation system that produces texts describing individuals or classes of OWL ontologies. Unlike simpler OWL verbalizers, which typically express a single axiom at a time in controlled, often not entirely fluent natural language primarily for the benefit of domain experts, we aim to generate fluent and coherent multi-sentence texts for end-users. With a system like NaturalOWL, one can publish information in OWL on the Web, along with automatically produced corresponding texts in multiple languages, making the information accessible not only to computer programs and domain experts, but also end-users. We discuss the processing stages of NaturalOWL, the optional domain-dependent linguistic resources that the system can use at each stage, and why they are useful. We also present trials showing that when the domain-dependent llinguistic resources are available, NaturalOWL produces significantly better texts compared to a simpler verbalizer, and that the resources can be created with relatively light effort.