An English to logic translator for ontology-based knowledge representation languages

Ontologies provide advantages of knowledge reusability, sharing, and greater robustness when used to build large knowledge-based applications. Unfortunately, translating between English statements and a specific ontology requires skill in knowledge engineering and an understanding of formal logic and the ontology itself. A knowledge engineer must be familiar with the concepts in the ontology, the fine distinctions between terms, and the specific way the ontology conceptualizes the world. We have developed a tool, CELT (controlled English to logic translation), to enable nonprogrammers to add knowledge expressed in terms of an ontology. CELT is an automatic translation tool to convert controlled English to KIF formulas using ontologies built with the suggested upper merged ontology (SUMO). Wordnet provides a base lexicon and a default preference for word senses. We do not expect CELT to obviate the need for knowledge engineers but to instead better leverage their time, as current machine translation tools assist professional human translators.