NaturalOWL: Generating Texts from OWL Ontologies in Protégé and in Second Life

Abstract

Abstract. NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protégé that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly. natural languages from the same ontology; their content and expressions can also be tailored to the type of the user (e.g., child vs. adult) and to the user’s interaction history (e.g., by avoiding repetitions of information, or by comparing to previous objects, as shown in Figures 1 and 2). 1