Natural Language Generation in the context of the Semantic Web

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bouayad-Agha, Nadjet^; | Casamayor, Gerard | Wanner, Leo^;

Affiliations: Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Pompeu Fabra University, C/Roc Boronat, 138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: {nadjet.bouayad,gerard.casamayor,leo.wanner}@upf.edu | Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies, Passeig Lluís Companys, 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: Natural Language Generation (NLG) is concerned with transforming given content input into a natural language output, given some communicative goal. Although this input can take various forms and representations, it is the semantic/conceptual representations that have always been considered as the “natural” starting ground for NLG. Therefore, it is natural that the Semantic Web (SW), with its machine-processable representation of information with explicitly defined semantics, has attracted the interest of NLG practitioners from early on. We attempt to provide an overview of the main paradigms of NLG from SW data, emphasizing how the Semantic Web provides opportunities for the NLG community to improve their state-of-the-art approaches whilst bringing about challenges that need to be addressed before we can speak of a real symbiosis between NLG and the Semantic Web.

Keywords: Semantics, natural language text generation, semantic web formalisms, web resources

DOI: 10.3233/SW-130125

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 493-513, 2014