Ramona Enache

Controlled language for everyday use: the MOLTO phrasebook

Controlled languages are usually targeted for technical domains and designed to be unambiguous. This paper presents a controlled language whose domain is touristic phrases, aimed to be usable by anyone without prior training. Despite its informal nature, the language of phrases has a firm notion of semantics, defining the correctness of translations. However, this semantics is formulated in terms of context and situation rather than by logical formulas. Moreover, the language is often ambiguous, and the translation may depend on resolving the ambiguity. This paper shows how to formalize a semantics for tourist phrases and implement it in 15 languages, how to deal with the ambiguities, and how to make the system available for layman users on the web and on mobile phones. While a useful application as such, the Phrasebook also paves the way for an extended notion of controlled language, and the techniques are aimed to be general enough to support many such extensions.

Typeful ontologies with direct multilingual verbalization

We have developed a methodology for representation of ontologies in a strictly typed language with dependent types. The methodology is supported by an experiment where we translated SUMO (Suggested Upper-Merged Ontology) to GF (Grammatical Framework). The representation of SUMO in GF preserves the expressivity of the original ontology, adding to this the advantages of a type system and built-in support for natural language generation. SUMO is the largest open-source ontology describing over 10,000 concepts and the relations between them, along with a number of first-order axioms, which are further on used in performing automated reasoning on the ontology. GF is a type-theoretical grammar formalism mainly used for natural language applications. Through the logical framework that it incorporates, GF allows a consistent ontology representation, and thanks to its grammatical features the ontology is directly verbalized in a number of controlled natural languages.

Multilingual online generation from semantic web ontologies

In this paper we report on our ongoing work in the EU project Multilingual Online Translation (MOLTO), supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement FP7-ICT-247914. More specifically, we present work workpackage 8 (WP8): Case Study: Cultural Heritage. The objective of the work is to build an ontology-based multilingual application for museum information on the Web. Our approach relies on the innovative idea of Reason-able View of the Web of linked data applied to the domain of cultural heritage. We have been developing a Web application that uses Semantic Web ontologies for generating coherent multilingual natural language descriptions about museum objects. We have been experimenting with museum data to test our approach and find that it performs well for the examined languages.

Multilingual Verbalisation of Modular Ontologies Using GF and lemon

This paper presents an approach to multilingual ontology verbalisation of controlled language based on the Grammatical Framework (GF) and the lemon model. It addresses specific challenges that arise when classes are used to create a consensus-based conceptual framework, in which many parties individually contribute instances. The approach is presented alongside a concrete case, in which ontologies are used to capture business processes by linguistically untrained stakeholders across business disciplines. GF is used to create multilingual grammars that enable transparent multilingual verbalisation. Capturing the instance labels in lemon lexicons reduces the need for GF engineering to the class level: The lemon lexicons with the labels of the instances are converted into GF grammars based on a mapping described in this paper. The grammars are modularised in accordance with the ontology modularisation and can deal with the different styles of label choosing that occur in practice.

Multilingual Natural Language Interaction with Semantic Web Knowledge Bases and Linked Open Data

This chapter presents a novel approach to Semantic Web technologies with the cultural heritage domain as a use case. Semantic Web technologies offer the technological backbone to meet the requirement of integrating heterogeneous data, but they are still more adapted to be consumed by computers rather than by humans. This chapter describes a method that allows interaction with semantic knowledge bases in natural language . The proposed method enables querying a semantic repository in natural language and obtaining results from it as a coherent text. The solution involves a conversion from natural language to SPARQL on one hand and from a set of Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples to coherent natural language descriptions in multiple languages on the other. The conversions are implemented in the Grammatical Framework (GF) . The semantic knowledge infrastructure in RDF is based on OWLIM-SE and the data integration method reason-able view supplied with an ontological reference layer. The latter is connected via formal rules to a semantic representation layer and to a syntactic representation layer using GF. The resulting demonstration is a system that supports querying and text generation in 15 languages.

An open-source computational grammar for romanian

We describe the implementation of a computational grammar for Romanian as a resource grammar in the GF project (Grammatical Framework). Resource grammars are the basic constituents of the GF library. They consist of morphological and syntactical modules which implement a common abstract syntax, also describing the basic features of a language. The present paper explores the main features of the Romanian grammar, along with the way they fit into the framework that GF provides. We also compare the implementation for Romanian with related resource grammars that exist already in the library. The current resource grammar allows generation and parsing of natural language and can be used in multilingual translations and other GF-related applications. Covering a wide range of specific morphological and syntactical features of the Romanian language, this GF resource grammar is the most comprehensive open-source grammar existing so far for Romanian.

Extracting Semantic Knowledge from Unstructured Text Using Embedded Controlled Language

Nowadays, most of the data on the Web is still in the form of unstructured text. Knowledge extraction from unstructured text is highly desirable but extremely challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language. In this article, we present an architecture of an information extraction system based on the concept of Embedded Controlled Language that allows for extracting formal semantic knowledge from an unstructured text corpus. Moreover, the presented approach has a potential to support multilingual input and output.

Embedded controlled language to facilitate information extraction from eGov policies

The goal of this paper is to propose a system that can extract formal semantic knowledge representation from natural language eGov policies. We present an architecture that allows for extracting Controlled Natural Language (CNL) statements from heterogeneous natural language texts with the ability to support multilinguality. The approach is based on the concept of embedded CNLs.

A Cloud-Based Editor for Multilingual Grammars

Writing deep linguistic grammars has been considered a highly specialized skill, requiring the use of tools with steep learning curves and complex installation procedures. As the use of statistical methods has increased, new generations of computational linguists are getting less and less prepared for grammar writing tasks. In an aim to provide a better learning experience for grammar writers, we present a grammar engineering tool that resides in the cloud. It has been used in several tutorial courses and self-studies, and it allows absolute beginners to write their first grammars and parse examples in 10 minutes. The cloud-based grammar engineering tool is built on top of GF (Grammatical Framework), a grammar formalism that has an explicit tecto/phenogrammar distinction, is based on ideas from type theory and functional programming and comes equipped with a grammar library supporting 30 languages.

A Type-Theoretical Wide-Coverage Computational Grammar for Swedish

The work describes a wide-coverage computational grammar for Swedish. It is developed using GF (Grammatical Framework), a functional language specialized for grammar programming. We trained and evaluated the grammar by using Talbanken, one of the largest treebanks for Swedish. As a result 65% of the Talbanken trees were translated into the GF format in the training stage and 76% of the noun phrases were parsed during the evaluation. Moreover, we obtained a language model for Swedish which we use for disambiguation.