Ontology-driven development of dialogue systems

Abstract

A new technique and its software implementation are presented to create a deeply semantically structured ontology using plain natural language text as input, without regular structure or any previous tagging and markup. The new  approach is primarily aimed at highly inflectional languages, and is implemented for Ukrainian. The automatically created ontologies (in OWL) could be easily converted to other graph databases formats, such as Neo4j, and were successfully  evaluated as valid ontologies using Protégé, RDFlib and Neo4j environments. An integrated approach is proposed for the  development of natural language dialogue systems driven by the ontologyrelated graph database using the Cypher  language for the formal queries. The original phrases are subject to a special method of semantic analysis, which  determines the type of formal query to the database. The essence of the analysis is that the text of the user’s phrase goes through a series of checks. Based on their results, a set of basic templates for the formal requests are determined, as well  as additional constructions that are attached to the basic template. Some of the checks may also return the notion  of substitution to certain specified positions of the formal query. Formal queries can return both contexts and lists of  ontology concepts. In addition to concepts, queries can also return information about specific semantic predicates that connect them, which simplifies the synthesis of natural language responses. The synthesis of answers is based on special  templates, the choice of which is directly related to the corresponding template of the formal query.