Developing a natural language interface to complex data
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
An English language question answering system for a large relational database
Communications of the ACM
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The paper discusses the design principles and current status of a natural language front end for access to data bases. This Is based on the use, first, of a semantically-oriented question analyser exploiting general, language-wide semantic categories and patterns, rather than data base-specific ones; and, second, of a data base-oriented translation component for obtaining search specifications from the meaning representations for questions derived by the analyser. This approach is motivated by the desire to reduce the effort of providing data base-specific material for the front end, by the belief that a general analyser is well suited to the "casual" data base user, and by the assumption that the rich semantic apparatus used will be both adequate as a means of analysis and appropriate as a tool for linking the characterisations of input and data language items. The paper describes this approach in more detail, with emphasis on the existing, tested, analyser.