Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces To Databases.

Craig W. Thompson, Kenneth M. Ross, Harry R. Tennant, Richard M. Saenz: Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces To Databases. VLDB 1983: 43-55

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/vldb/ThompsonRTS83,
  author    = {Craig W. Thompson and
               Kenneth M. Ross and
               Harry R. Tennant and
               Richard M. Saenz},
  editor    = {Mario Schkolnick and
               Costantino Thanos},
  title     = {Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces To Databases},
  booktitle = {9th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, October
               31 - November 2, 1983, Florence, Italy, Proceedings},
  publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann},
  year      = {1983},
  isbn      = {0-934613-15-X},
  pages     = {43-55},
  ee        = {db/conf/vldb/ThompsonRTS83.html},
  crossref  = {DBLP:conf/vldb/83},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

Abstract

Natural language interfaces to databases are not in common use today for two main reasons: they are difficult to use and they are expensive to build and maintain. This paper presents a functional overview of a new kind of natural language interface that goes far in overcoming both of these problems. The "ease-of-use" problem is solved by wedding a menu-based interaction technique to a traditional semantic grammar-driven natural language system. Using this approach, all user queries are "understood" by the system. The "creation and maintenance problem" is solved by designing a core grammar with parameters supplied by the data dictionary and then automatically generating semantic grammars covering some selected subpart of the user's data. Automatically generated natural language interfaces offer the user an attractive way to group semantically related tables together, to model a user's access rights, and to model a user's view of supported joins paths in a database.

Copyright © 1983 by the VLDB Endowment. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by the permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment.

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Mario Schkolnick, Costantino Thanos (Eds.): 9th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, October 31 - November 2, 1983, Florence, Italy, Proceedings. Morgan Kaufmann 1983, ISBN 0-934613-15-X
Contents

References

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[Grosz et al. 1982]: ...
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[Kaplan 1979]: ...
[Ross 1982]: ...
[Tennant 1980]: ...
[Tennant et al. 1983]: ...