概念体系を中心とした自然言語インターフェース構築フレームワーク

抄録

Natural language interfaces are expected to come into practical use in many situations. It is, however, not practical to expect to achieve a universal interface because language use is so diverse. To that end, not only advancements in speech and language technologies but also well-designed development frameworks are required so that developers can build domain-specific interfaces rapidly and easily. This paper proposes KNOLU, a framework for building natural language interfaces of a broad range of applications. Developers using this framework can easily build an interface capable of understanding subsets of natural language expressions just by providing an ontology (a concept hierarchy with semantic frames and a lexicon), an onomasticon (a set of instances and their names) and API functions that provide procedural knowledge required to connect the interface to a target application. To develop an interface using KNOLU, first developers define a concept hierarchy for a target domain. Then they provide other declarative and procedural knowledge components with these knowledge components asscicated to the hierarchy. This developmental flow affords an unobstructed view both for development and maintanance. KNOLU uses an existing general-purpose parser and requires neither grammar rules nor expression patterns. It does not require rules to generate semantic interpretations from parsing results, either. Therefore, developers can build an interface without deep knowledge and experience of natural language processing. We applied KNOLU to two applications and confirmed the effectiveness.