TANLION - TAmil Natural Language Interface for Querying ONtologies

An ontology contains numerous information in a formal way which cannot be easily understood by casual users. Rendering a natural language interface to ontologies will be more useful for such users, as it allows them to retrieve the necessary information without knowing about the formal specifications existing in the ontologies. Until now, most such interfaces have only been built for accepting user queries in English. Besides English, providing interface to ontologies in other native and regional languages should also be explored, as it enables the casual users to gather information from an ontology without any language barrier. One of the most popular languages in South Asia is Tamil, a classical language. In this paper, we present our research experience in developing TANLION, a Tamil interface for querying ontologies. It accepts a Tamil query from an end-user and tries to recognize the information that the user needs. If that information is available in the ontology, our system retrieves it and presents to the user in Tamil.

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