Natural Language-Based Approach for Helping in the Reuse of Ontology Design Patterns

Experiments in the reuse of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have revealed that users with different levels of expertise in ontology modelling face difficulties when reusing ODPs. With the aim of tackling this problem we propose a method and a tool for supporting a semi-automatic reuse of ODPs that takes as input formulations in natural language (NL) of the domain aspect to be modelled, and obtains as output a set of ODPs for solving the initial ontological needs. The correspondence between ODPs and NL formulations is done through Lexico-Syntactic Patterns, linguistic constructs that convey the semantic relations present in ODPs, and which constitute the main contribution of this paper. The main benefit of the proposed approach is the use of non-restricted NL formulations in various languages for obtaining ODPs. The use of full NL poses challenges in the disambiguation of linguistic expressions that we expect to solve with user interaction, among other strategies.