Generating Natural Language Descriptions from OWL Ontologies: the NaturalOWL System

TL;DR

NaturalOWL is a system that generates fluent, multi-sentence natural language descriptions from OWL ontologies, making semantic web data accessible to end-users in multiple languages.

Contribution

It introduces a method for producing coherent, multi-sentence texts from OWL ontologies, improving over simpler verbalizers by utilizing domain-dependent linguistic resources.

Findings

NaturalOWL produces significantly better texts with linguistic resources.

The linguistic resources can be created with relatively light effort.

The system enables publishing OWL data with accessible natural language descriptions.

Abstract

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.