Automatic Translation between
Declarative Formalisms for Knowledge Representation
Atanas Kiryakov,
M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computer Science,
Sofia University, November 1995
 
Abstract

The great efforts needed for design and creation of significant
knowledge bases lead to the necessity of knowledge sharing and reuse.
So, we have to translate knowledge between many formalisms where each
one is especially designed to solve a separate class of problems. The
proposed translation schema uses intermediate knowledge
representation, called interlingua. The interlingua approach
allows for the minimization of the translation efforts for no direct
translations between various formalisms are needed any longer
([Simov95], [Fikes91]).

Knowledge base translation can be separated in three phases. First, we
have to express the implicit knowledge about the source formalism into
the target formalism. Therefore we describe the source language into
the target one by creating equivalents for its concepts and
restrictions. During the second phase we have to translate the domain
conceptualization (the ontology) into the target language. So, we can
simplify and guarantee the corectness of the third phase --- the real
knowledge translation. We can build translation grammars automatically
performing the tasks included in the last two translation phases.

Here we also give an example of a knowledge translation from
SRL (a formalism based on typed feature structures, which is
described in [King89] to KIF, demonstrating a three-phase
translation process. The KIF language is designed to be an interlingua
and here we use it for this purpose
 

The whole thesis can not be found in English.
 

Part of
Bibliography

Fikes, Richard E., Cutkosky, M., Gruber, Thomas R., Van Baalen, J.,
Knowledge Sharing Technology - Project Overview, Knowledge System Laboratory, Stanford University, 1991.

King, Paul J.,
A Logical Formalism For Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, Department of Mathematics, 1989

Simov, Kiril I.
Communication between knowledge bases, technical report on MCA10/94 project, Bulgarian Academy of Sci., 1995