Natural Language Access to Public Administration Data: The TAMIC-P System

The main goal of the TAMIC-P project is to demonstrate the opportunities offered by the use of Natural Language Processing technologies in the human-machine interaction, in particular related to data access in complex environments. The Natural Language interface has been proposed as a modality of access complementary to other techniques, such as graphical interfaces. It shows its power when used in scenarios characterised by a relevant number of distributed information sources, in which current interfaces do not offer appropriate solutions to the complexity of data handling, and often generate difficulties in navigation. These problems turn out to become even more critical in the presence of not skilled users, having low technical knowledge. Using Natural Language, as normally used between persons for communicating, reduces the skill requirements and enhances the system usability. The evaluation tests performed on the TAMIC-P system confirm this point, showing that upon just a short training, a non-skilled operator is able to operate with effectiveness.

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