yA Compositional Semantics for a Wide-coverage Natural-Language Query Interface to a Semantic Web Triplestore

Many Natural Language (NL) Query Interfaces to data stores convert queries to a formal query language and then execute the formal query in order to obtain the result. This is problematic when handling chained prepositional phrases. An alternative approach is to treat the NL query language as a formal language and to execute the NL query directly with respect to the data store. This approach can accommodate a wide range of NL queries and is relatively easy to implement if it is based on an extension of Richard Montague's denotational semantics (MS) for natural language. The higher-order functional capability of the programming language Haskell facilitates both the implementation of MS and the close integration of syntactic analysis with semantic processing. A publicly accessible web-based NL interface to a remote Semantic Web data store has been constructed to demonstrate the viability of this approach. The approach can be directly adapted for use with relational databases.