Abstract. With large datasets such as Linked Open Data available, there is a need for more user-friendly interfaces which will bring the advantages of these data closer to the casual users. Several recent studies have shown user preference to Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) in comparison to others. Although many NLIs to ontologies have been developed, those that have reasonable performance are domain-specific and tend to require customisation for each new domain which, from a developer's perspective, makes them expensive to maintain. We present our system FREyA, which combines syntactic parsing with the knowledge encoded in ontologies in order to reduce the customisation effort. If the system fails to automatically derive an answer, it will generate clarification dialogs for the user. The user's selections are saved and used for training the system in order to improve its performance over time. FREyA is evaluated using Mooney Geoquery dataset with very high precision and recall.

Abstract. Natural Language Interfaces are increasingly relevant for information systems fronting rich structured data stores such as RDF and OWL repositories, mainly because of the conception of them being intuitive for human. In the previous work, we developed FREyA, an interactive Natural Language Interface for querying ontologies. It uses syntactic parsing in combination with the ontology-based lookup in order to interpret the question, and involves the user if necessary. The user's choices are used for training the system in order to improve its performance over time. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of FREyA to query the Linked Open Data. We report its performance in terms of precision and recall using the MusicBrainz and DBpedia datasets.

Abstract. Accessing structured data such as that encoded in ontologies and knowledge bases can be done using either syntactically complex formal query languages like SPARQL or complicated form interfaces that require expensive customisation to each particular application domain. This paper presents the QuestIO system -a natural language interface for accessing structured information, that is domain independent and easy to use without training. It aims to bring the simplicity of Google's search interface to conceptual retrieval by automatically converting short conceptual queries into formal ones, which can then be executed against any semantic repository.QuestIO was developed specifically to be robust with regard to language ambiguities, incomplete or syntactically ill-formed queries, by harnessing the structure of ontologies, fuzzy string matching, and ontology-motivated similarity metrics.

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Abstract. This collaborative report highlights the properties and prospects of Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs). The report poses a range of questions concerning the goals of the CNL, the design, the linguistic aspects, the relationships and evaluation of CNLs, and the application tools. In posing the questions, the report attempts to structure the field of CNLs and to encourage further systematic discussion by researchers and developers.

Abstract. Concept recommendation is a widely used technique aimed to assist users to chose the right tags, improve their Web search experience and a multitude of other tasks. In finding potential problem solvers in Open Innovation (OI) scenarios, the concept recommendation is of a crucial importance as it can help to discover the right topics, directly or laterally related to an innovation problem. Such topics then could be used to identify relevant experts. We propose two Linked Data-based concept recommendation methods for topic discovery. The first one, hyProximity, exploits only the particularities of Linked Data structures, while the other one applies a well-known Information Retrieval method, Random Indexing, to the linked data. We compare the two methods against the baseline in the gold standard-based and user study-based evaluations, using the real problems and solutions from an OI company.

Abstract.We propose an approach for searching large RDF graphs, using advanced vector space models, and in particular, Random Indexing (RI). We first generate documents from an RDF Graph, and then index them using RI in order to generate a semantic index, which is then used to find similarities between graph nodes. We have experimented with large RDF graphs in the domain of life sciences and engaged the domain experts in two stages: firstly, to generate a set of keywords of interest to them, and secondly to judge on the quality of the output of the Random Indexing method, which generated a set of similar terms (literals and URIs) for each keyword of interest.

Traditional E-Tourism applications store data internally in a form that is not interoperable with similar systems. Hence, tourist agents spend plenty of time updating data about vacation packages in order to provide good service to their clients. On the other hand, their clients spend plenty of time searching for the ‘perfect’ vacation package as the data about tourist offers are not integrated and are available from different spots on the Web. We developed Travel Guides - a prototype system for tourism management to illustrate how semantic web technologies combined with traditional E-Tourism applications: a.) help integration of tourism sources dispersed on the Web b) enable creating sophisticated user profiles. Maintaining quality user profiles enables system personalization and adaptivity of the content shown to the user. The core of this system is in ontologies – they enable machine readable and machine understandable representation of the data and more importantly reasoning.