A dialogue system based on ontology automatically built through a natural language text analysis

Abstract

An integrated approach is created to the development of natural-language dialogue systems driven by an ontological graph database. Ontology here has a defined regular structure that contains typed semantic relationships between concepts, as well as related contexts, which may also have a multilevel structure and additional typing. The ontology is created automatically due to the semantic analysis of a natural language using a specially developed original software, which is set up to work with inflected languages, in particular Ukrainian. The ontology description is serialized in OWL format. To work as part of the dialog system, the ontology is transferred to the graph database Neo4j. The Cypher language is used for formal queries. The original phrases of the user are subject to a special method of semantic analysis, which determines the type of formal query to the database. The essence of the analysis is that the text of the user phrase goes through a series of checks. Based on their results, a set of basic templates for formal requests is determined, as well as additional constructions that are attached to the basic template. Some of the checks may also return the notion of substitution to certain specified positions of the formal query. Formal queries can return both contexts and lists of ontology concepts. In addition to concepts, queries can also return information about specific semantic predicates that connect them, which simplifies the synthesis of natural language responses. The synthesis of answers is based on special templates, the choice of which is directly related to the corresponding template of the formal query.