ONTOGENERATION: Reusing Domain and Linguistic Ontologies for Spanish Text Generation

A significant problem facing the reuse of ontologies is to make their content more widely accessible to any potential user. Wording all the information represented in an ontology is the best way to ease the retrieval and understanding of its contents. This article proposes a general approach to reuse domain and linguistic ontologies with natural language generation technology, describing a practical system for the generation of Spanish texts in the domain of chemical substances. For this purpose the following steps have been taken: (a) an ontology in the chemicals domain developed under the METHONTOLOGY framework and the Ontology Design Environment (ODE) has been taken as knowledge source; (b) the linguistic ontology GUM (Generalized Upper Model) used in other languages has been extended and modified for Spanish; (c) a Spanish grammar has been built following the systemic-functional model by using the KPML (Komet-Penman Multilingual) environment. As result, the final system named Ontogeneration permits the user to consult and retrieve all the information of the ontology in Spanish.