Multilingual verbalization of ORM conceptual models and axiomatized ontologies

Abstract

Verbalization is the process of writing the semantics captured in axioms into natural language sentences, which enables domain experts (who are not trained to understand technical/formal languages) to be able to participate in the modeling and validation processes of their domain knowledge. We present a novel approach to support multilingual verbalization of logical theories, axiomatizations, and other specifications such as business rules. This engineering solution is demonstrated with the Object Role Modeling language and the ontology engineering tool DogmaModeler, although its underlying principles can be reused with other conceptual models and formal languages, such as Description Logics, to improve its understandability and usability by the domain expert. Our engineering solution for multilingual verbalization is characterized by its flexibility, extensibility and maintainability of the verbalization templates, which allow for easy augmentation with other languages than the 10 currently supported