The Linked Data initiative comprises structured databases in the Semantic-Web data model RDF. Exploring this heterogeneous data by structured query languages is tedious and error-prone even for skilled users. To ease the task, this paper presents a methodology for translating natural language questions into structured SPARQL queries over linked-data sources.#R##N##R##N#Our method is based on an integer linear program to solve several disambiguation tasks jointly: the segmentation of questions into phrases; the mapping of phrases to semantic entities, classes, and relations; and the construction of SPARQL triple patterns. Our solution harnesses the rich type system provided by knowledge bases in the web of linked data, to constrain our semantic-coherence objective function. We present experiments on both the question translation and the resulting query answering.
['Mohamed Yahya', 'Klaus Berberich', 'Shady Elbassuoni', 'Maya Ramanath', 'Volker Tresp', 'Gerhard Weikum']
Natural Language Questions for the Web of Data