Developing a natural language interface to complex data
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
The semantic data model: a modelling mechanism for data base applications
SIGMOD '78 Proceedings of the 1978 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data
The Structural Model for Database Design
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Entity-Relationship Approach to Systems Analysis and Design
Interpreting natural language database updates
Interpreting natural language database updates
Indirect responses to loaded questions
TINLAP '78 Proceedings of the 1978 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing
Interpreting natural language database updates
ACL '81 Proceedings of the 19th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Paraphrasing using given and new information in a question-answer system
ACL '79 Proceedings of the 17th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Research in knowledge base management systems
ACM SIGMOD Record
Natural language interfaces to databases: MIS impact, and a survey of their use and importance
SIGCPR '86 Proceedings of the twenty-second annual computer personnel research conference on Computer personnel research conference
Decomposing Heterogeneous Inter-Entity Relationship Updates
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Active Databases as a Paradigm for Enhanced Computing Environments
VLDB '83 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Time, tense and aspect in natural language database interfaces
Natural Language Engineering
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For natural language data base systems to operate effectively in practical domains, they must have the capabilities required by real applications. One such capability is understanding and performing update requests. The processing of natural language updates raises problems not encountered in the processing of queries. These difficulties stem from the fact that the user will naturally phrase requests with respect to his conception of the domain, which may be a considerable simplification of the actual underlying data base structure. Updates that are meaningful and unambiguous from the user's standpoint may not translate into reasonable changes to the underlying data base. Update requests may be impossible (cannot be performed in any way), ambiguous (can be performed in several ways), or pathological (can be performed only in ways that cause undesirable side effects).Drawing on work in linguistics and philosophy of language, we have developed a domain-transparent approach to identifying and performing "reasonable" changes in response to a user's update request, using only knowledge sources typically present in existing data base systems. A simple notion of "user model" and explanation with respect to the user's state of knowledge are central to the design. This paper describes a prototype system PIQUE (Program for Interpretation of Query/Update in English), which implements this approach.