Using Semantic Representations to Facilitate the Domain-Knowledge Portability of a Natural Language Interface to Databases

Our research is focused on the implementation of a Natural Language Interface to Database. We propose the use of ontologies to model the knowledge required by the interface with the aim of correctly answering natural language queries and facilitate its configuration on other databases. The knowledge of our interface is composed by modeling information about the database schema, its relationship to natural language and some linguistic functions. The design of this modeling allows users to configure the interface without performing complex and tedious tasks, facilitating its portability to other databases. To evaluate the knowledge-domain portability, we configured our interface and the commercial interface ELF in the Northwind database. The results obtained of the experimentation show that the knowledge modeled in our interface allowed it to achieve a good performance.