Querying an Ontology Using Natural Language

In the context of the development of a virtual tutor to support distance learning courses, this paper presents an approach to solve the problem of automatically answering questions posed by students in a natural language (Portuguese). Our approach is based on three main pillars: an ontology, a conversion process, and a querying process. First, the ontology, was built to model the knowledge regarding all aspects of the course; second, we defined a way of converting a natural language question to a SPARQL query; finally, the SPARQL query is executed and the result extracted from the ontology. Focusing on the second pillar mentioned above (the conversion of a NL question), we explain the whole process and present the results regarding a set of preliminary experiments.