Natural Language Expression VS SPARQL

SPARQL可以认为是针对语义WEB数据的查询语言，对于与传统关系数据库就是SQL。

实际使用WEB数据的时候，大部分终端用户是不明白这种比较专业的查询语句的，是否能对自然语言表达式进行自动转换呢？

针对把自然语言语句转换成SPARQL不是有非常多的工作，CIKM2012上有一篇文章介绍了把搜索引擎中的关键字查询转换成SPARQL，其利用了搜索引擎的日志数据。

最近发现两个有趣的相关项目AutoSPARQL和SPARQL2NL，前者把自然语言表达自动转换成SPARQL，后者执行相反的转换。并且都是有AKSW(http://aksw.org/About.html)完成的，才发现这是一个超牛的研究小组。

AutoSPARQL Convert a natural language expression to a SPARQL query

http://aksw.org/Projects/AutoSPARQL.html

     The underlying idea is to convert a natural language expression to a SPARQL query, which can then retrieve the answer of a question from a given triple store.

     AutoSPARQL: Let Users Query Your Knowledge Base by Jens Lehmann and Lorenz Bühmann in Proceedings of ESWC 2011

SPARQL2NL converting SPARQL queries to natural language

http://aksw.org/Projects/SPARQL2NL.html

     Over the last years, Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies have reached the backend of a considerable number of applications. While experts can easily access the data stored in these backends via the W3C standard SPARQL, most lay users do not understand this query language. Thus, they mostly have to rely on forms and query builders. We address this drawback by presenting a framework that allows converting virtually any SPARQL 1.0 query into natural language. Our framework implements a bottom-up approach that consists of normalizing the input query, converting it to natural language and reducing the query to make easily understandable. As our approach is generic, it does not only allow transforming queries but also to represent the answers to queries in natural language. Therewith, our approach can be used to enable users accessing triple stores without even having to deal with SPARQL or RDF.

    Sorry, I don’t speak SPARQL — Translating SPARQL Queries into Natural Language by Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Lorenz Bühmann, Christina Unger, Jens Lehmann and Daniel Gerber. in Proceedings of WWW 2013

两个都是很重要并且很实用的工作，需要持续关注。