A rule based approach for NLP based query processing

Information is playing an important role in our lives. One of the major sources of information is databases. Databases and database technology are having major impact on the growing use of computers. In order to retrieve information from a database, one needs to formulate a query in such way that the computer will understand and produce the desired output. Generally, query processing is handled by the Structured Query Language (SQL). But the non IT people cannot be able to write SQL queries as they may not be aware of the SQL as well as structure of the database. So there is a need for non-expert users to query the databases in their natural language instead of working with the values of the attributes. This paper proposes an approach for accessing the database easily using natural language without having any knowledge about the query language. The approach is a rule based approach. The obvious advantage is that it makes a great promise for computer interfaces easier for the use of general people. Because of this, people will be able to communicate to the computer in their own language instead of learning a specialized language or commands. In order to test our approach in an actual computer environment, we have developed a prototype system. We obtained promising results using our system.