NQML: Natural Query Markup Language

Natural Query Markup Language is a mechanism that facilitates natural language frontend to relational databases. NQML is used as an intermediate language to convert English questions to SQL queries. As an extension of XML, NQML is easy to use and its structure simplifies the construction of programs that understand it. By creating a set of NQML files in our tests, we could successfully provide a frontend to databases with support for SELECT queries with a wide variety of WHERE clauses. Although the current version of NQML is very nascent, its performance in the task of question-answering was very satisfactory. Further improvements and enhancements in NQML can significantly improve the performance of natural language interfaces.