Ontological Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding
Fabian M. Suchanek, Gerhard Weikum, Peter Baumgartner · 2005
This thesis presents OntoNat, a prototypical system for answering Yes/No-questions on natural language sentences. Different from exist-ing systems, OntoNat uses background knowledge from the Suggested Upper Model Ontology (SUMO)[NP01], so that it can perform some kind of common sense reasoning to answer a question. SUMO is translated to a disjunctive logic program (DLP). The input sentence and the Yes/No-question are also translated to DLPs, in cooperation with the Computa-tional Linguistics Department of Saarland University. These DLPs are given to a first-order theorem-prover (KRHyper[Wer03]), which tries to answer the question. Acknowledgement This work would not have been possible without the persisting support of my su-pervisor Dr. habil. Peter Baumgartner. He deserves my thanks for his patience and his fruitful comments.