Comparison in NLIs - Habitability and Database Reality

This paper describes the treatment of comparison and measures in Datenbank-DIALOG, 1 a German language interface to relational databases. Besides giving a short overview of the system architecture the paper shows how design strategies support the development of a habitable system taking as example comparison and measures both of which are important for many application domains of NLIs and non-trivial from a linguistic point of view. In contrast to some former work we pay attention not only to the purely linguistic part but equally to the mapping to the underlying database model. This way we arrive at a balanced treatment of syntax as well as semantics and pragmatics.