EUFID: The End User Friendly Interface to Data Management Systems

This paper describes a man-machine interface system, called EUFID, that will permit users of data management systems to communicate with those systems in natural language. At the same time, EUFID will act as a security screen to prevent unauthorized users from having access to particular fields in a data base. Our specific objective is to build a system that will be practical, efficient, and widely usable in existing, real-world applications. Our approach is to model the restricted set of linguistic structures and functions required for each application, rather than the manifold linguistic properties of natural language per se. This allows our system to be powerful enough to efficiently process English queries against specific data bases without attempting to understand forms of English that have little or no function in the contexts of those data bases.