WYSIWYM (Meant)
Encyclopedia
What You See Is What You Meant allows users to create abstract knowledge representation
s such as those required by the Semantic Web
using a natural language interface. Interestingly, no attempt at natural language understanding
(NLU) is made. Instead, natural language generation
(NLG) technology is used in a highly interactive manner:
This editor lets a user repeatedly select and refine spans of an initially more or less vacuous text, such as the sentence An event occurs. Using a mouse, place-holders in the initial text can be further refined by choosing options that are generated by natural language generation
technology based on an ontology
. During this process and invisible to the user, an underlying knowledge representation is created which can be used for multilingual document generation, formal knowledge formation, or any other task that requires formally specified information.
WYSIWYM and its generalization, Conceptual Authoring, have laid the foundation for current research towards a Semantic Web Authoring Tool (SWAT).
Knowledge representation
Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
s such as those required by the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
using a natural language interface. Interestingly, no attempt at natural language understanding
Natural language understanding
Natural language understanding is a subtopic of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension....
(NLU) is made. Instead, natural language generation
Natural language generation
Natural Language Generation is the natural language processing task of generating natural language from a machine representation system such as a knowledge base or a logical form...
(NLG) technology is used in a highly interactive manner:
This editor lets a user repeatedly select and refine spans of an initially more or less vacuous text, such as the sentence An event occurs. Using a mouse, place-holders in the initial text can be further refined by choosing options that are generated by natural language generation
Natural language generation
Natural Language Generation is the natural language processing task of generating natural language from a machine representation system such as a knowledge base or a logical form...
technology based on an ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. During this process and invisible to the user, an underlying knowledge representation is created which can be used for multilingual document generation, formal knowledge formation, or any other task that requires formally specified information.
WYSIWYM and its generalization, Conceptual Authoring, have laid the foundation for current research towards a Semantic Web Authoring Tool (SWAT).
External links
- Conceptual Authoring at Natural Language Generation group of the Open University
- SWAT: Semantic Web Authoring Tool research project
- WYSIWYM home page