... EVALUATION OF NATURALLANGUAGE INTERFACES TODATABASE SYSTEMS:
A PANEL DISCUSSION
Norman K. Sondheimer, Chair
Sperry Univac
Blue Bell, PA
For a naturallanguage access todatabase
system to be ... like for natural
language access to database? Under this
point, what niches look most promising for
natural language interfaces? What standards
should he set for naturallanguage systems
performance? ...
Recently, this has begun to change. In the
last several years, many of the current
generation of naturallanguage access to
database systems have been subject to
laboratory or field testing....
... experimental
systems for
natural- language
access to databases,
with some now going into actual use, many problems
in this area remain to be solved. The purpose of
this panel is to put some of those ...
that,
too often in the past,
discussion of natural- language access to databases
has focused, at the expense of the underlying
issues, on what particular systems can or cannot
do. To avoid ...
questions. The mapping between a
natural- language
question
and
the corresponding database query,
however, can differ dramatically according to the
way the database is organized. For instance,...
... other problems in
natural language access to databases.
In addition to considering some subset of the
chairman's five problems, each of the panelists was
invited to propose and choose ... into three radi-
cally different database query language expressions
depending on how the database is set up. It may he
appropriate to retrieve a pre-stored total number of
employees from a ... which TQA assigns to the sen-
tence
"What is the zone of the vacant parcels in subplan-
ning area 410?"
53
THEORETICAL/TECHNICAL ISSUES IN NATURALLANGUAGE ACCESS TO DATABASES
S....
...
access to databases is that the work is restricted
to providing access to databases, whereas users
would appreciate NL interfaces to computer systems
in general. Moreover, the
attempt to
provide ... "bottom-up" effort to make
database languages more like natural language.
However Prolog is much more general than
relational database formalisms, in
that it
permits
data to be defined ... should
not struggle too hard to bend one's NL interface
to fit an existing database. Rather the database
should be designed to meet the needs of NL access.
If the database does not easily...
... application toNaturalLanguage
Database Interfacing.
Ph.D. Thesis, Royal Institute
of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
316
Semantic Information Preprocessing
for NaturalLanguage Interfaces to Databases ...
lectional restrictions to parsers in natural
language interfaces (NLIs) to databases by
extracting the selectional restrictions from
semantic descriptions of those NLIs. Au-
tomating the process ... Introduction
An approach is described for supplying selectional
restrictions to parsers in naturallanguage interfaces
(NLIs) to databases. The work is based on Linguis-
tic Domain Theories (LDTs)...
...
is to try to capture the physicians" written " ;Natural
Language& quot; for describing patients and to write programs
to convert these descriptions to the appropriate coded
input to ... N. NaturalLanguage Information FormatttnB:
The Automatic Conversion of Texts into a Structured
Data-Base, In Advances in Computers, Yovits M.
[Ed.], Vol. 17, 1978.
9. SanBster B. NaturalLanguage ...
given
to
the eye
but
is taken orally.
In addition to this, ic £s generally not possible
to
know
at the clme of encountering a word whether it refers to
an existing Instance or to a new...
... language atoms=
=X=~em=,
The principle motivation for building natural
language systems for database access is ~o free the
user from the need for data processing instruction.
A naturallanguage ... program should
understand. For example, a naturallanguage front
end to a stock market database should understand
that
(1) Did IBM go up yesterday?
refers to PRZCE and not VOLUME. However, the ... Domain-Independent NaturalLanguageDatabase Access Systems
Steven P. Shvartz
Cognitive Systems Inc.
234 Church Street
New Haven, Ca.
06510
Zn the past decade, a number of natural lang-
uage database...
...
Issues in NaturalLanguage Access to
Databases," in
Proceedings of the 20th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics,
Toronto, Ontario, 1982 pp. 51-6.
(Stolfo and ... Laboratory,
San Jose, Ca., Technical Report RJ2144(29407),
1978.
(Cohen 78). Cohen, P., On Knowing What to Say:
Planning Speech Acts, Technical Report No.
118, University of Toronto, Toronto, ... environment
:for testing, but allow us to explore more interesting
natural language questions? In order to answer ,o to
the first question and yes to the second (the position
taken by our...
... into some naturallanguage
interface and be done with it.
This paper discusses the naturallanguage technology used
in building INKA. The system incorporates a diverse collec-
tion of natural ... instruction to start using INGLISH. Ini-
tially there is a preference to tt~ the mouse to explore the cov-
erage and then to begin to incorporate some typing. We have
not had any long-term use~ to ... appUca-
t/on code can be inherited from prev/ously defined
SmaIitalk code. The programmer need only redefine
differences by overriding
the
inappropriate code with
custom/zed
code.
(Alexander...
... usually crippling for any
attempt to provide naturallanguage interfaces for data base
systems. Information extracted from naturallanguage text can
only be stored to the extent that it fits the ...
temporal descriptions will have to embody such an ontology,
as will any usable temporal database for knowledge about
events which is to be interrogated using natural language.
1. Introduction
It ... such as the
prepuratory activity of climbing or to the consequent
state of having climbed the mountain; or
b) to treat the entire event as a culmination, to c(m~oose
it
into a nucleus with...
... semantic represen-
tation of the input tocodeto carry out the user's re-
quest.
Second,
an intensional logic can supplement a
taxonomic language in trying to define word senses
formally. ... Human
Knowledge. In
Language Comprehension and the
Acquisition of Knowledge,
Winston and Sons,
Washington, 1972.
12. Clark, H.H. Bridging. Theoretical Issues in
Natural Language Processing, ... APPROACH TO REPRESENTATION IN THE
JANUS NATURALLANGUAGE PROCESSOR
Ralph M. Weischedel
BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
10 Moulton St.
CambHdge, MA 02138
Abstract
In BBN's natural...
... I. Corporation offers licenses for customers
to
use
the INTELLECT software on their computers, to access
their databases. We now have a number of customer instal-
lations, plus reports from ... answers
based on it, to the terminal user. It is a general
software tool, which can be easily applied to a wide va-
riety of databases and user environments. For each
database, a Lexicon, ...
permits people to access data who are unwilling or un-
able to learn how to use a structured query system. All
that is required is that a person know enough about the
data to be able to pose a...
... D., Database
description with SDM: A semantic database
model. ACM TODS 6:3, Sept. 1981,
pp. 351-386.
Harris, L.R., Using the database itself
as a semantic component to aid the parsing
of natural ... specification
We depend heavily on this correspondence to proc-
ess naturallanguage updates, just as the statlve
correspondence is used to process naturallanguage
queries. In the next section we examine ...
Waltz, D., Naturallanguage access to a
large database: an engineering approach.
In Proc. of the Fourth Int'l Joint Conf.
onArtlficial Intelligence, 1976.
73
We must be able to readily...
... for parsing to automatically spe-
cialize a given source grammar to a specific domain.
In that case, EBL is used as a method for adapting a
general grammar and/or parser to the sub -language
defined ... set of prototypical construc-
tions. Therefore, the EBL approach is also very
interesting for naturallanguage generation (NLG).
Informally, NLG is the production of a natural
language text ... sb. de
Abstract
This paper presents a method for the au-
tomatic extraction of subgrammars to con-
trol and speeding-up naturallanguage gen-
eration NLG. The method is based on
explanation-based...