Natural Language Understanding API [closed]

Question

I am unaware if such an API or service exists currently so this is a vague question, my apologies.

I have a PHP script that works with Freebase and I was wondering if I can enable it so a user can ask a question on my site which will be deconstructed using natural language processing, query the Freebase API and then return an answer.

Does anyone know of an already existing tool like this that works with Freebase?

If not, does anyone know of any great Natural Language Understanding APIs that would be able to strip down a question such as "how tall is mount everest?" and tell my script to query "height" on the mount everest article on Freebase?

Arise

products.wolframalpha.com/api if you don't mind using the wolfram alpha database rather than freebase – Glottochronology

Answer 1

This is a great question. Natural language understanding is a difficult problem and there aren't a lot of drop-in solutions out there. The problem that you've described (eg. "How tall is Mount Everest?") is actually better known as question answering.

Here is some research into question answering that used Freebase data including IBM's Watson computer: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/585641/freebase/papers/added/0/tag/question+answering/

Here are some templates in Freebase that map Freebase properties to English sentences: https://www.freebase.com/base/natlang/predicate_relation?instances

Here is a simple open source app that I built which does some basic question answering using the Freebase APIs: http://answers.freebaseapps.com/?q=what+is+the+elevation+of+mount+everest

The Quepy project uses Python to do question answering using either DBpedia or Freebase data.

Please let us know what else you discover, there's certainly a lot more that we could be doing in this area.

Teerell

Thanks Shawn, it's great to talk to a Googler about something like this because you're obviously going to know your stuff! I'm intrigued by the Freebase Answers app but it doesn't seem very "intelligent"... Might play around with the code for that. Otherwise, @MarkBaker recommended the Wolfram Alpha API - seems to do all the NLP and delivers answers but something free would be better. – Arise

That's true. The app that I built was just a prototype to see what was possible by only matching one fact at a time in Freebase for questions of the form "What is the X of Y?". The Quepy project is an example of how to do more robust template matching. – Teerell

A useful answer. I hesitate on the +1 as the first link is to an empty document and the 3rd is a 404. – Capitalist

Answer 2

Quick update: The Quepy release is ready! :D Currently Quepy provides support for Sparql and MQL query languages. We plan to extended it to other database query languages.

The full code here: http://github.com/machinalis/quepy

Full documentation here: http://quepy.readthedocs.org/

Demo: http://quepy.machinalis.com/

Trotman

Answer 3

I also have great news; At this moment the Quepy team is working to start using the Freebase APIs. So soon we will share Quepy using Freebase to the community.

We are very happy about this.

You can contact us at our Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/quepy https://github.com/machinalis/quepy/

Trotman

Answer 4

Another update: just saw that AlchemyAPI has such an API for NLU, really understanding language, objects, semantics, and deriving pragmatisms. A demo is at http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/

Grochow

Are you at all associated with this company or its products? – Tepefy