A Multilingual SPARQL-Based Retrieval Interface for Cultural Heritage Objects

In this paper we present a multilingual SPARQL-based [1] retrieval interface for querying cultural heritage data in natural language (NL). The presented system offers an elegant grammar-based approach which is based on Grammatical Framework (GF) [2], a grammar formalism supporting multilingual applications. Using GF, we are able to present a cross-language SPARQL grammar covering 15 languages and a cross-language retrieval interface that uses this grammar for interacting with the Semantic Web. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of SPARQL generation and parsing via GF that is published as a knowledge representation infrastructure-based prototype. Querying the Semantic Web in natural language, more specifically, using English to formulate SPARQL queries with the help of controlled natural language (CNL) syntax has been developed before [3,4]. Such approaches, based on verbalization methods are adequate for English, but in a multilingual setting where major challenges such as lexical and structural gaps become prominent [5], grammar-based approaches are preferable. The work presented here complements the method proposed by Lopez et al. [6] in that it faces the challenges in realizing NL in real world systems, not only in English, but also in multiple languages.