Journal ArticleDOI
Natural language interfaces to databases
Ann Copestake,Karen Sparck Jones +1 more
TLDR
The paper discusses the issues, both general to language and task-specific, involved in front end design, and the way these have been addressed, concentrating on the work of the last decade, indicating that future progress will depend on the one hand on general advances in natural language processing, and on the other on expanding the capabilities of traditional databases.Abstract:
This paper reviews the current state of the art in natural language access to databases. This has been a long-standing area of work in natural language processing. But though some commercial systems are now available, providing front ends has proved much harder than was expected, and the necessary limitations on front ends have to be recognized. The paper discusses the issues, both general to language and task-specific, involved in front end design, and the way these have been addressed, concentrating on the work of the last decade. The focus is on the central process of translating a natural language question into a database query, but other supporting functions are also covered. The points are illustrated by the use of a single example application. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the current state, indicating that future progress will depend on the one hand on general advances in natural language processing, and on the other on expanding the capabilities of traditional databases.read more
Citations
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Posted Content
Natural Language Interfaces to Databases - An Introduction
TL;DR: Natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) as discussed by the authors have been studied extensively in the field of natural language processing and have attracted much attention in the last few decades, especially for query languages, form-based interfaces and graphical interfaces.
Journal ArticleDOI
Natural language interfaces to databases-An introduction
TL;DR: This paper is an introduction to natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBS) and some less explored areas of NLIDB research are presented, namely database updates, meta-knowledge questions, temporal questions, and multi-modal NLIDBS.
Journal ArticleDOI
Natural language question answering: the view from here
TL;DR: The best systems are now able to answer more than two thirds of factual questions in this evaluation, with recent successes reported in a series of question-answering evaluations.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables
Panupong Pasupat,Percy Liang +1 more
TL;DR: This paper proposed a logical-form driven parsing algorithm guided by strong typing constraints and showed that it obtains significant improvements over natural baselines for answering complex questions on semi-structured tables.
Book
Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems: An Analysis and Review
TL;DR: This comprehensive state-of-the-art book is the first devoted to the important and timely issue of evaluating NLP systems, and provides a wide-ranging and careful analysis of evaluation concepts, reinforced with extensive illustrations.
References
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TL;DR: Readers of this book will gain a strong working knowledge of the overall structure, concepts, and objectives of database systems and will become familiar with the theoretical principles underlying the construction of such systems.
MonographDOI
Text generation: using discourse strategies and focus constraints to generate natural language text
TL;DR: Preface Introduction 2. Discourse structure 3. Focusing in discourse 4. TEXT system implementation 5.discourse history 6. Related generation research 7. Summary and conclusions
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Developing a natural language interface to complex data
TL;DR: In this article, an intelligent interface that provides natural language access to a large body of data distributed over a computer network is described, showing how a user is buffered from the actual database management systems (DBMSs) by three layers of insulating components.
Journal ArticleDOI
An English language question answering system for a large relational database
TL;DR: By typing requests in English, casual users will be able to obtain explicit answers from a large relational database of aircraft flight and maintenance data using a system called PLANES, which uses a number of augmented transition networks to match phrases with a specific meaning.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Baseball: an automatic question-answerer
TL;DR: Baseball is a computer program that answers questions phrased in ordinary English about stored data as mentioned in this paper, where the program reads the question from punched cards and then determines the phrase structure and other syntactic facts for content analysis.