| Querying the semantic web with ginseng: A guided input natural language search engine (2005) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| Abstract. The Semantic Web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic. Common users, however, seem to have problems even with the simplest Boolean expression. As queries from web search engines show, the great majority of users simply do not use Boolean expressions. So how can we help users to query a web of logic that they do not seem to understand? We address this problem by presenting Ginseng, a quasi natural language guided query interface to the Semantic Web. Ginseng relies on a simple question grammar which gets dynamically extended by the structure of an ontology to guide users in formulating queries in a language seemingly akin to English. Based on the grammar Ginseng then translates the queries into a Semantic Web query language (RDQL), which allows their execution. Our evaluation with 20 users shows that Ginseng is extremely simple to use without any training (as opposed to any logic-based querying approach) resulting in very good query performance (precision = 92.8%, recall = 98.4%). We, furthermore, found that even with its simple grammar/approach Ginseng could process over 40 % of questions from a query corpus without modification. 1 | |||||||||||||||
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