OntoVerbal: a Generic Tool and Practical Application to SNOMED CT

Ontology development is a non-trivial task requiring expertise in the chosen ontological language. We propose a method for making the content of ontologies more transparent by presenting, through the use of natural language generation, naturalistic descriptions of ontology classes as textual paragraphs. The method has been implemented in a proof-of-concept system, OntoVerbal, that automatically generates paragraph-sized textual descriptions of ontological classes expressed in OWL. OntoVerbal has been applied to ontologies that can be loaded into Protege and been evaluated with SNOMED CT, showing that it provides coherent, well-structured and accurate textual descriptions of ontology classes.

[1]  Robert Stevens,et al.  Automating generation of textual class definitions from OWL to English , 2011, J. Biomed. Semant..

[2]  Robert Stevens,et al.  OntoVerbal-M: a Multilingual Verbaliser for SNOMED CT , 2011, MSW.

[3]  Natalya F. Noy,et al.  Protégé: A Tool for Managing and Using Terminology in Radiology Applications , 2007, Journal of Digital Imaging.

[4]  Chris Mellish,et al.  A Reference Architecture for Natural Language Generation Systems , 2006, Natural Language Engineering.

[5]  Enrico Motta,et al.  KC-Viz: A Novel Approach to Visualizing and Navigating Ontologies , 2010, EKAW.

[6]  M. Garman.  Psycholinguistics , 1992 .

[7]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Toward a Synthesis of Two Accounts of Discourse Structure , 1996, CL.

[8]  Tobias Kuhn.  The understandability of OWL statements in controlled English , 2013, Semantic Web.

[9]  M. Reape,et al.  Just what is aggregation anyway ? , 2007 .

[10]  William C. Mann,et al.  Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization , 1988 .

[11]  Ion Androutsopoulos,et al.  An Open-Source Natural Language Generator for OWL Ontologies and its Use in Protege and Second Life , 2009, EACL.

[12]  Ian Horrocks,et al.  From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: the making of a Web Ontology Language , 2003, J. Web Semant..

[13]  Richard Power,et al.  OWL to English: a tool for generating organised easily-navigated hypertexts from ontologies , 2011 .

[14]  Charles B. Callaway.  Integrating Discourse Markers into a Pipelined Natural Language Generation Architecture , 2003, ACL.

[15]  James A. Hendler,et al.  Swoop: A Web Ontology Editing Browser , 2006, J. Web Semant..

[16]  Kevin Barraclough,et al.  I and i , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[17]  W. Marsden.  I and J , 2012 .

[18]  Amy Isard,et al.  Speaking the Users' Languages , 2003, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[19]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Edinburgh Research Explorer Using automatically labelled examples to classify rhetorical relations: an assessment , 2022 .

[20]  Chris Mellish,et al.  Experiments Using Stochastic Search for Text Planning , 1998, INLG.

[21]  C. Mellish,et al.  ILEX: an architecture for a dynamic hypertext generation system , 2001, Natural Language Engineering.

[22]  Akrivi Katifori,et al.  Ontology visualization methods—a survey , 2007, CSUR.

[23]  Chris Mellish,et al.  ILEX: an architecture for a dynamic hypertext generation system , 2001, Nat. Lang. Eng..

[24]  Kent A. Spackman,et al.  SNOMED clinical terms: overview of the development process and project status , 2001, AMIA.

[25]  Donia Scott,et al.  Document Structure , 2003, CL.

[26]  Catherine Dolbear,et al.  Rabbit: Developing a Control Natural Language for Authoring Ontologies , 2008, ESWC.

[27]  Ian Horrocks,et al.  Description Logics as Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web , 2005, Mechanizing Mathematical Reasoning.

[28]  Richard Power,et al.  Grouping Axioms for More Coherent Ontology Descriptions , 2010, INLG.

[29]  Vladimir I. Levenshtein,et al.  Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals , 1965 .

[30]  Kent A. Spackman,et al.  Compositional concept representation using SNOMED: towards further convergence of clinical terminologies , 1998, AMIA.