Rapid porting of the Parlance natural language interface
HLT '89 Proceedings of the workshop on Speech and Natural Language
Aspects of the automatic generation of SQL statements in a natural language query interface
Information Systems - Data bases: their creation, management, and utilization
CoBase: a scalable and extensible cooperative information system
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue on intelligent integration of information
An English language question answering system for a large relational database
Communications of the ACM
Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
A STEP towards realizing Codd's vision of rendezvous with the casual user
VLDB '07 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases
QGen: generation module for the register restricted InBASE system
CICLing'03 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing
A domain independent natural language interface to databases capable of processing complex queries
MICAI'05 Proceedings of the 4th Mexican international conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence
Dialogue manager for a NLIDB for solving the semantic ellipsis problem in query formulation
KES'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Knowledge-based and intelligent information and engineering systems: Part II
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A natural language interface to databases (NLIDB) without help mechanisms that permit clarifying queries is prone to incorrect query translation. In this paper we draw attention to a problem in NLIDBs that has been overlooked and has not been dealt with systematically: word economy; i.e., the omission of words when expressing a query in natural language (NL). In order to get an idea of the magnitude of this problem, we conducted experiments on EnglishQuery when applied to a corpora of economized-wording queries. The results show that the percentage of correctly answered queries is 18%, which is substantially lower than those obtained with corpora of regular queries (53%---83%). In this paper we describe a typification of problems found in economized-wording queries, which has been used to implement domain-independent dialog processes for an NLIDB in Spanish. The incorporation of dialog processes in an NLIDB permits users to clarify queries in NL, thus improving the percentage of correctly answered queries. This paper presents the tests of a dialog manager that deals with four types of query problems, which permits to improve the percentage of correctly answered queries from 60% to 91%. Due to the generality of our approach, we claim that it can be applied to other domain-dependent or domain-independent NLIDBs, as well as other NLs such as English, French, Italian, etc.