June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Natural Language Querying of the Semantic Web SRI International Information Science Institute

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Beyond Single Question Single Source Answers Most question answering systems to date have been limited to querying a single kind of source, a corpus of texts, for answers to a given question. Most have been limited to answering single questions with single factual answers. Aim: to move beyond these limits  Use of multiple (semi-)structured sources  Information-gathering dialogues

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA QUARK Natural language front end  Gemini: Unification Grammar (CFG backbone) Mediated by powerful reasoning tool  SNARK: Full FO Theorem Prover Powerful resource description and access capabilities  OAA: Intelligent delegation-based middleware Visualization capabilities  TerraVision: Terrain Viewer

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Multiple Sources Access to multiple knowledge sources  ADL Gazetteer  CIA World Factbook  NASA data sources  TextPro IE engine

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Goal: To Integrate DAML Search into QUARK Agent Semantic Communications Service (ASCS) Developed by Teknowledge. Searches the Web for DAML pages. Provides GUI for search. Provides inference capability aimed at broadening and relaxation of queries.

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA The ASCS Search Page

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA ASCS: A Use Case pred: capital arg1: arg2:Syria ?x Searches entire Semantic Web Also conjunctive queries: population of capital of Syria To find the capital of Syria, a user must input Problem: Doesn’t support natural language input; using ASCS requires knowing some logic. capital(?x,Syria)

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA How to Use ASCS in QUARK Questions parsed by Gemini to yield logical form. Logical form submitted to SNARK as conjecture. Conjecture proved in application-domain theory. Capabilities of ASCS and other sources advertised in theory. ASCS provided with OAA wrapper. Resources invoked as appropriate by procedural attachment. Answer, as extracted from proof. Presented textually Visualization tool invoked

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA “Show the capitals of Islamic countries that border Iraq.” Logical form produced by Gemini: (and country (?x) islamic (?x) bordering-relation (?z) goal (?z, iraq) source (?z, ?x) capital-of (?u, ?x) show (?v) patient (?v, ?u)) Answer: ?v

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Conjecture decomposed by SNARK To show a country is Islamic, use the axioms in the application-domain theory: if religions (?country, Muslim, ?percent) and ?percent > 50 then islamic (?country) if (SunniMuslim ?x, then Muslim ?x) A country that is more than 50 percent Muslim is Islamic. A SunniMuslim is a Muslim.

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA ASCS Reveals Basic Facts borders(Iraq, Syria) borders(Iraq, Turkey), ….. religions(Syria, SunniMuslim, 74) religions(Syria, Christian, 10), … capital(Syria, Damascus)

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Other Agents Reveal other Facts Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer: place-to-latlong(Damascus, capital, Syria; 33.5, 36.3)

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Answer visualization by Terrain Viewer Damascus (capital),Syria; 33.5,36.3

June 12, 2003AQUAINT 18 Month Meeting San Diego CA Future Plans To move beyond single, one-off questions to scenario-based information-seeking dialogues. Scenario description presents a sketch of a situation/problem; much is left unsaid. To be filled out by a combination of application-domain theories and clarification/expansion dialogues. Ground further question-answering on the resulting situation model.