... experimental systems for natural- language access to databases, with some now going into actual use, many problems in this area remain to be solved. The purpose of this panel is to put some of those ... that, too often in the past, discussion of natural- languageaccesstodatabases has focused, at the expense of the underlying issues, on what particular systems can or cannot do. To avoid ... NATURAL- LANGUAGEACCESSTODATABASES THEORETICAL/TECHNICAL ISSUES Robert C. Moore Artificial Intelligence...
... other problems in natural languageaccessto databases. In addition to considering some subset of the chairman's five problems, each of the panelists was invited to propose and choose ... which TQA assigns to the sen- tence "What is the zone of the vacant parcels in subplan- ning area 410?" 53 THEORETICAL/TECHNICAL ISSUES IN NATURALLANGUAGEACCESSTODATABASES S. ... establishing the completeness of query languages offer little or no guidance as to the construction of a practical translator from relational calculus to a formal query language such as SQL. Hence,...
... access todatabases is that the work is restricted to providing accessto databases, whereas users would appreciate NL interfaces to computer systems in general. Moreover, the attempt to ... reallsed in the language Prolog, has a great deal in common with the relational approach to databases, which can be seen as the result of a "bottom-up" effort to make database languages ... looked into very far, but it would seem to be primarily a database rather than a linguistic issue, and to highlight the limitations of traditional databases, where all facts have to be stored...
... application toNaturalLanguage Database Interfacing. Ph.D. Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. 316 Semantic Information Preprocessing for NaturalLanguage Interfaces toDatabases ... lectional restrictions to parsers in natural language interfaces (NLIs) todatabases by extracting the selectional restrictions from semantic descriptions of those NLIs. Au- tomating the process ... Introduction An approach is described for supplying selectional restrictions to parsers in naturallanguage interfaces (NLIs) to databases. The work is based on Linguis- tic Domain Theories (LDTs)...
... is to try to capture the physicians" written " ;Natural Language& quot; for describing patients and to write programs to convert these descriptions to the appropriate coded input to ... N. NaturalLanguage Information FormatttnB: The Automatic Conversion of Texts into a Structured Data-Base, In Advances in Computers, Yovits M. [Ed.], Vol. 17, 1978. 9. SanBster B. NaturalLanguage ... given to the eye but is taken orally. In addition to this, ic £s generally not possible to know at the clme of encountering a word whether it refers to an existing Instance or to a new...
... EVALUATION OF NATURALLANGUAGE INTERFACES TO DATABASE SYSTEMS: A PANEL DISCUSSION Norman K. Sondheimer, Chair Sperry Univac Blue Bell, PA For a naturallanguageaccessto database system to be ... Recently, this has begun to change. In the last several years, many of the current generation of naturallanguageaccessto database systems have been subject to laboratory or field testing. ... like for natural language accessto database? Under this point, what niches look most promising for natural language interfaces? What standards should he set for naturallanguage systems performance?...
... language atoms= =X=~em=, The principle motivation for building natural language systems for database access is ~o free the user from the need for data processing instruction. A naturallanguage ... domain-independent natural language access system because language understan- ding requires domain-specific world knowledge. On a theoretical level, the need for a knowledge base in a naturallanguage ... program should understand. For example, a naturallanguage front end to a stock market database should understand that (1) Did IBM go up yesterday? refers to PRZCE and not VOLUME. However, the...
... NATURAL LANGUAGE AND DATABASES, AGAIN Karen Sparck Jones Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England INTRODUCTION Natural Language and Databases ... richness of naturallanguage expressions to obtain sensible database mappings.) The second reason for doubting the continuing utility of database query as a field for natural language research, ... history as a vehicle for naturallanguage research. Its value for this purpose was restated, for example, by Bonnie Webber at IJCAI-83 (Webber 1983). I nevertheless think it is now time to...
... a naturallanguage inter- face to include the programming environment is that if the interface were being developed in such an environment, one could use naturallanguageto develop the natural ... cases where a request was too vague, and the system (like an expert system) could present a series of choice points to the user in order to reduce the original request to a manageable one. Presenting ... rarely-changed aspect of the environment. Such a natural language interface might also cope with "how to& quot; questions, at least serving as another link to on-line documentation. The linguistically...
... instruction to start using INGLISH. Ini- tially there is a preference to tt~ the mouse to explore the cov- erage and then to begin to incorporate some typing. We have not had any long-term use~ to ... into some naturallanguage interface and be done with it. This paper discusses the naturallanguage technology used in building INKA. The system incorporates a diverse collec- tion of natural ... In short, the our approach to building practical natural language inte~ ees does not depend on a semantic grammar to ¢oastra/n input. In the future we intend to explore the u~ of a wider...
... usually crippling for any attempt to provide naturallanguage interfaces for data base systems. Information extracted from naturallanguage text can only be stored to the extent that it fits the ... category which forces it to undergo a transition, then the alter- natives that are available are: a) to decompose the core event into a nucleus and to make a transition to one of the componants, ... such as the prepuratory activity of climbing or to the consequent state of having climbed the mountain; or b) to treat the entire event as a culmination, to c(m~oose it into a nucleus with...
... Human Knowledge. In Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of Knowledge, Winston and Sons, Washington, 1972. 12. Clark, H.H. Bridging. Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, ... APPROACH TO REPRESENTATION IN THE JANUS NATURALLANGUAGE PROCESSOR Ralph M. Weischedel BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation 10 Moulton St. CambHdge, MA 02138 Abstract In BBN's natural ... desire to capitalize on other advantages we perceived for applying it tonaturallanguage processing (NLP), such as the potential simplicity and compositionality of mapping from syntactic form to...
... for parsing to automatically spe- cialize a given source grammar to a specific domain. In that case, EBL is used as a method for adapting a general grammar and/or parser to the sub -language defined ... set of prototypical construc- tions. Therefore, the EBL approach is also very interesting for naturallanguage generation (NLG). Informally, NLG is the production of a natural language text ... sb. de Abstract This paper presents a method for the au- tomatic extraction of subgrammars to con- trol and speeding-up naturallanguage gen- eration NLG. The method is based on explanation-based...