For humans understanding a natural language sentence or discourse is so effortless that we
hardly ever think about it. For machines however the task of interpreting natural language
especially grasping meaning beyond the literal content has proven extremely difficult and
requires a large amount of background knowledge. This book focuses on the interpretation of
natural language with respect to specific domain knowledge captured in ontologies. The main
contribution is an approach that puts ontologies at the center of the interpretation process.
This means that ontologies not only provide a formalization of domain knowledge necessary for
interpretation but also support and guide the construction of meaning representations. We start
with an introduction to ontologies and demonstrate how linguistic information can be attached
to them by means of the ontology lexicon model lemon. These lexica then serve as basis for the
automatic generation of grammars which we use to compositionally construct meaning
representations that conform with the vocabulary of an underlying ontology. As a result the
level of representational granularity is not driven by language but by the semantic
distinctions made in the underlying ontology and thus by distinctions that are relevant in the
context of a particular domain. We highlight some of the challenges involved in the
construction of ontology-based meaning representations and show how ontologies can be
exploited for ambiguity resolution and the interpretation of temporal expressions. Finally we
present a question answering system that combines all tools and techniques introduced
throughout the book in a real-world application and sketch how the presented approach can
scale to larger multi-domain scenarios in the context of the Semantic Web. Table of Contents:
List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Ontologies Linguistic Formalisms
Ontology Lexica Grammar Generation Putting Everything Together Ontological Reasoning for
Ambiguity Resolution Temporal Interpretation Ontology-Based Interpretation for Question
Answering Conclusion Bibliography Authors' Biographies
