Designing a Portable Natural Language Database Query System

One barrier to the acceptance of natural language database query systems is the substantial installation effort required for each new database. Much of this effort involves the encoding of semantic knowledge for the domain of discourse, necessary to correctly interpret and respond to natural language questions. For such systems to be practical, techniques must be developed to increase their portability to new domains. This paper discusses several issues involving the portability of natural language interfaces to database systems, and presents the approach taken in CO-OP — a natural language database query system that provides cooperative responses to English questions and operates with a typical CODA-SYL database system. CO-OP derives its domain-specific knowledge from a lexicon (the list of words known to the system) and the information already present in the structure and content of the underlying database. Experience with the implementation suggests that strategies that are not directly derivative of cognitive or linguistic models may nonetheless play an important role in the development of practical natural language systems.

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