A Deterministic Analyzer for the Interpretation of Natural Language Commands

This paper describes a system which translates a query in Italian language into a representation which can be immediately interpreted as a sequence of algebraic operations on a relational data base. The use of a lookshead buffer allows the system to operate deterministically. Different knowledge sources are used to cope with semantics (associated with the lexicon) and syntax (represented as pajt tern-action rules). These knowledge sources cooper ate during the query translation so that independent translation steps and intermediate representations of the command are avoided. Therefore the term "determinism" is used to mean that all the structures built during the process concur to build the final command representation.