Collaborative multilingual knowledge management based on controlled natural language

Abstract

User interfaces are a critical aspect of semantic knowledge representation systems, as users have to understand and use a formal representation language to model a particular domain of interest, which is known to be a difficult task. Things are even more challenging in a multilingual setting, where users speaking different languages have to create a multilingual ontology. To address these problems, we introduce a semantic wiki system that is based on controlled natural language to provide an intuitive yet formal interface. We use a well-defined subset of Attempto Controlled English (ACE) implemented in Grammatical Framework. Our wiki system offers precise bidirectional automatic translations between ACE and language fragments of a number of other natural languages, making the wiki content accessible multilingually. Because ACE has a partial but deterministic mapping to the Web Ontology Language, our wiki engine can offer automatic reasoning and question answering over the wiki content. Users speaking different languages can therefore build, query, and view the same knowledge base in an intuitive and user-friendly interface based on the respective natural language. We present the results of a user evaluation where participants using different languages were asked to write and assess statements about European geography in our wiki environment. Our results show that users reach a high level of consensus, which is not negatively affected by the presence of automatic translation.