... 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 todatabases has focused, at the expense of the underlying issues, on what particular systems can or cannot do. To avoid ... NATURAL- LANGUAGE ACCESS TODATABASES THEORETICAL/TECHNICAL ISSUES Robert C. Moore Artificial Intelligence...
... establishing the completeness of query languages offer little or no guidance as to the construction of a practical translator from relational calculus to a formal query language such as SQL. Hence, ... 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 ... 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 TODATABASES S....
... access todatabases 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 ... reallsed in the language Prolog, has a great deal in common with the relational approach to databases, which can be seen as the result of a "bottom-up" effort to make database languages ... "front-end" todatabases is surely putting the cart before the horse. What one should really do is to investigate what "back-end" is needed to support NL interfaces to computers,...
... application toNaturalLanguage Database Interfacing. Ph.D. Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. 316 Semantic Information Preprocessing for NaturalLanguage Interfaces toDatabases ... lectional restrictions to parsers in natural language interfaces (NLIs) todatabases 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...
... EVALUATION OF NATURALLANGUAGE INTERFACES TO DATABASE SYSTEMS: A PANEL DISCUSSION Norman K. Sondheimer, Chair Sperry Univac Blue Bell, PA For a naturallanguage access to database 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....
... NATURAL LANGUAGE AND DATABASES, AGAIN Karen Sparck Jones Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England INTRODUCTION Natural Language and Databases ... richness of naturallanguage expressions to obtain sensible database mappings.) The second reason for doubting the continuing utility of database query as a field for natural language research, ... history as a vehicle for naturallanguage research. Its value for this purpose was restated, for example, by Bonnie Webber at IJCAI-83 (Webber 1983). I nevertheless think it is now time to...
... a naturallanguage inter- face to include the programming environment is that if the interface were being developed in such an environment, one could use naturallanguageto develop the natural ... rarely-changed aspect of the environment. Such a natural language interface might also cope with "how to& quot; questions, at least serving as another link to on-line documentation. The linguistically ... series of choice points to the user in order to reduce the original request to a manageable one. Presenting these choices would provide a convenient forum for research in language production,...
... 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 ... necessary to construct a problem specific interface for acquiring utter- antes expressed in this sublanguage. In fact, the idea of using this technique to build acquisition interfaces, using...
... 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 ... category which forces it to undergo a transition, then the alter- natives that are available are: a) to decompose the core event into a nucleus and to make a transition to one of the componants, ... 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...
... 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 ... desire to capitalize on other advantages we perceived for applying it tonaturallanguage processing (NLP), such as the potential simplicity and compositionality of mapping from syntactic form to...
... 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...
... different tasks in each of these use cases al-lowed the interfaceto include functionality com-mon to different types of NLP system development. Interface functionality will be de-scribed as groups ... Annotation Toolkit, though, provides a con-venient way for developers to use existing annota-tions in their algorithms. This feeds the pipeline workflow that allows more complex annotations to be ... the interface. The interface does not replace the need for NLP algorithms – developers have a plethora of patterns and decision rules, symbolic grammars, and ma-chine learning techniques to...
... free to choose any template from set A to start sentence construction and is also free to choose any se-quence during filling up values for set A. The system will be a free order naturallanguage ... INDIA pbiswas@sit.iitkgp.ernet.in Abstract Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a way to automatically realize a correct ex-pression in response to a communicative goal. This technology is ... will be described. The automatic language generation mechanism of the present system uses the following steps Taking Input from Users The user has to give input to the system using the form...