An Abstract, Shared and Persistent Data Structure for Supporting Database Management and Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Neither today’s general purpose programming environment nor high-level programming languages, including those designed for AI purposes, provide adequate support for database systems. Furthermore, non-English language databases are difficult to treat either in existing database systems or with current high-level languages, because they require culture-sensitive operations on multiple foreign character sets. In this paper, we present an abstract, shared and persistent data structure, called HL+, capable of supporting database management applications. We also describe the means for coping with the aforementioned problems by accessing HL+ features of database management from high-level programming languages with an extensible programmable high-level language interface. Extensions to the data structure to accommodate processing of multiple foreign character strings are also described, and examples of multilingual applications are given.