Problems and some solutions in customization of natural language database front ends
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
A framework for choosing a database query language
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Automatic text processing: the transformation, analysis, and retrieval of information by computer
Automatic text processing: the transformation, analysis, and retrieval of information by computer
Semantics modeling issues for processing natural language database queries
CSC '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation
Presupposition, anaphora, and reasoning about change
ECAI '92 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Artificial intelligence
Query abbreviation in the entity-relationship data model
Information Systems
Incomplete path expressions and their disambiguation
SIGMOD '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse
Computational Linguistics
Natural language grammars for an information system
SIGIR '83 Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Semi-Automatic Anaphora Resolution in Portable Natural Language Interfaces
SBIA '96 Proceedings of the 13th Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence: Advances in Artificial Intelligence
ZOO: A Desktop Experiment Management Environment
VLDB '96 Proceedings of the 22th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
A Case-Based Reasoning Approach for Associative Query Answering
ISMIS '94 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems
Query Formulation from High-Level Concepts for Relational Databases
UIDIS '99 Proceedings of the 1999 User Interfaces to Data Intensive Systems
Associative Query Answering via Query Feature Similarity
IIS '97 Proceedings of the 1997 IASTED International Conference on Intelligent Information Systems (IIS '97)
A pragmatics-based approach to ellipsis resolution
Computational Linguistics
EACL '91 Proceedings of the fifth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
An improved heuristic for ellipsis processing
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Anaphora resolution: a multi-strategy approach
COLING '88 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
Efficient collaborative discourse: a theory and its implementation
HLT '93 Proceedings of the workshop on Human Language Technology
Making database systems usable
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
NaLIX: A generic natural language search environment for XML data
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
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The traditional interaction mechanism with a database system is through the use of a query language, the most widely used one being SQL. However, when one is facing a situation where he or she has to make a minor modification to a previously issued SQL query, either the whole query has to be written from scratch, or one has to invoke an editor to edit the query. This, however, is not the way we converse with each other as humans. During the course of a conversation, the preceding interaction is used as a context within which many incomplete and/or incremental phrases are uniquely and unambiguously interpreted, sparing the need to repeat the same things again and again. In this paper, we present an effective mechanism that allows a user to interact with a database system in a way similar to the way humans converse. More specifically, incomplete SQL queries are accepted as input which are then matched to identified parts of previously issued queries. Disambiguation is achieved by using various types of semantic information. The overall method works independently of the domain under which it is used (i.e., independently of the database schema). Several algorithms that are variations of the same basic mechanism are proposed. They are mutually compared with respect to efficiency and accuracy through a limited set of experiments on human subjects. The results have been encouraging, especially when semantic knowledge from the schema is exploited, laying a potential foundation for conversational querying in databases.