Databases and Natural Language Interfaces

A Natural Language Interface for Databases allows users of multimedia kiosks to formulate natural language questions. User questions are first translated into a logic language and subsequently into Structured Query Language (SQL), which is processed by a database management system to return the answer. This paper focuses on the translation stage. Special attention is devoted to the conceptual model, a relational database that organizes all the data supporting the translation process. The translation algorithm is presented and commented examples are used to better understand its functioning.