OntoDoc: Automatically Generating Ontology Resource Descriptions
Juan Guajardo Gutierrez, Mike Tran, Nasim Shirvani Mahdavi, Chengkai Li
Abstract
Knowledge graphs and ontologies form the backbone of structured, machine-readable knowledge representation, yet ontology terms often lack natural language descriptions, limiting their accessibility and reuse. Existing ontology verbalization approaches tend to rely on rule-based or template-driven techniques that operate on strict, formal schema axioms, resulting in rigid verbalizations that fail to convey richer contextual semantics. We present OntoDoc, a multi-agent framework for automatically generating natural language descriptions for any Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) within a SPARQL endpoint or RDF file. OntoDoc operates through a four-stage pipeline: (1) a Database Context agent that adaptively explores the knowledge graph via SPARQL to collect semantically informative triples about the target IRI; (2) a Web Context agent that retrieves and re-ranks encyclopedic background knowledge from Wikipedia and the open web; (3) an Assumption Generation agent that synthesizes both contexts into a structured, evidence-grounded list of intermediate assumptions; and (4) a Description Generation agent that produces the final natural language description from the grounded assumptions. We evaluate OntoDoc on three knowledge graphs spanning biomedical, agricultural, and cross-domain settings, using both automatic scoring via Large Language Models (LLMs) and human evaluation with 11 annotators. OntoDoc consistently matches or exceeds a naive LLM baseline and a template-based ontology verbalizer in accuracy. Furthermore, it vastly outperforms both baselines in the completeness of the generated descriptions, delivering an average 12% improvement in completeness over the naive baseline across all domains, and improving completeness scores by as much as 2.8 points on a 5-point scale relative to the ontology verbalizer.