A language facility for designing database-intensive applications
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) - Special issue: papers from the international conference on very large data bases: September 22–24, 1975, Framingham, MA
Database abstractions: aggregation and generalization
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
An English language question answering system for a large relational database
Communications of the ACM
Extended semantics for generalization hierarchies
SIGMOD '78 Proceedings of the 1978 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data
A response to the need for summary responses
ACL '84 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
The TEXT system for natural language generation: an overview
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Augmenting a database knowledge representation for natural language generation
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Providing Quality Responses with Natural Language Interfaces: The Null Value Problem
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The multimedia articulation of answers in a natural language database query system
ANLC '88 Proceedings of the second conference on Applied natural language processing
Evaluating response strategies in a Web-based spoken dialogue agent
COLING '98 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2
Summarizing microblogs automatically
HLT '10 Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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In a human dialogue it is usually considered inappropriate if one conversant monopolizes the conversation. Similarly it can be inappropriate for a natural language database interface to respond with a lengthy list of data. A non-enumerative "summary" response is less verbose and often avoids misleading the user where an extensional response might.In this paper we investigate the problem of generating such discourse-oriented concise responses. We present details of the design and implementation of a system that produces summary responses to queries of a relational data base. The system employs a set of heuristics that work in conjunction with a knowledge base to discover underlying regularities that form the basis of summary responses. The system is largely domain-independent, and hence can be ported relatively easily from one data base to another. It can handle a wide variety of situations requiring a summary response and can be readily extended. It also has a number of shortcomings which are discussed thoroughly and which form the basis for a number of suggested research directions.