Exploring Fact Verbalisations for Conceptual Query Formulation

An increasing number of conceptual modelling techniques use verbalisation of sample data to derive a model for the given universe of discourse (the problem domain). The underlying assumption is that by elaborate verbalisation of samples taken from the universe of discourse one can elicit an overview of the concepts relevant for the universe of discourse and their interrelationships. In each of these approaches, information modelling is considered as a process leading to some form of an information grammar that describes the expert language; the language used to communicate in the universe of discourse. In this article we start by discussing a mechanism to support these verbalisations and associated information grammar. We then show how to mine the richness of the verbalisations in the context of a conceptual query language. It is shown how these verbalisations lead to formulations that closely resemble the expert language.