title: A prototype natural language interface to a large complex knowledge base, the Foundational Model of Anatomy.
abstract: We describe a constrained natural language interface to a large knowledge base, the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). The interface, called GAPP, handles simple or nested questions that can be parsed to the form, subject-relation-object, where subject or object is unknown. With the aid of domain-specific dictionaries the parsed sentence is converted to queries in the StruQL graph-searching query language, then sent to a server we developed, called OQAFMA, that queries the FMA and returns output as XML. Preliminary evaluation shows that GAPP has the potential to be used in the evaluation of the FMA by domain experts in anatomy.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Biological Structure and Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Distelhorst
authors.forename: Vishrut
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Srivastava
authors.forename: Cornelius
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rosse
authors.forename: James F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Brinkley
mesh_terms: D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification*; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011381:Programming Languages; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled