... Translation and its application toNaturalLanguage Database Interfacing. Ph.D. Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. 316 Semantic Information Preprocessing for Natural ... 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 ... and may avoid errors introduced by hand- coding selectional restrictions. 1 Introduction An approach is described for supplying selectional restrictions to parsers in naturallanguage interfaces...
... been many 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 ... invited to propose and discuss one issue of their own choosing. II QUANTITY QUESTIONS Database query languages typically provide some means for counting and totaling that must be invoked for answering ... "how many" questions. The mapping between a natural- language question and the corresponding database query, however, can differ dramatically according to the way the database is organized....
... 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, the approach used in translating ... the transformational apparatus utilized in the TQA Ques- tion Answering System provides a principled basis for handling these and many other problems in natural language access to databases. ... ISSUES IN NATURALLANGUAGE ACCESS TODATABASES S. R. Petrick IBM T.J. Watson Research Center INTRODUCTION In responding to the guidelines established by the session chairman of this panel, three...
... interessant du francais. RAIRO 13, 4 (1979), pp. 309-336. [Presented as -~ -An interesting natural language subset" at the Workshop on Logic and Databases, Toulouse, 1977]. 3. Dahl V. Translating ... "sailed" to calculate the distance D travelled, rather than cause a simple data look- up. C. Quantifying into Questions Quantifying into questions is an issue which was an important concern ... issues in naturallanguage (NL) access todatabases in the light of an experimental NL questlon-answering system, Chat, which I wrote with Fernando Perelra at Edinburgh University, and which...
... natural language access to database? Under this point, what niches look most promising for natural language interfaces? What standards should he set for naturallanguage systems performance? ... EVALUATION OF NATURALLANGUAGEINTERFACESTO DATABASE SYSTEMS: A PANEL DISCUSSION Norman K. Sondheimer, Chair Sperry Univac Blue Bell, PA For a naturallanguage access to database system to be ... Recently, this has begun to change. In the last several years, many of the current generation of naturallanguage access to database systems have been subject to laboratory or field testing....
... nor co and, an elliptical statement but one often requiring an action. F8 (False Sta~c): These are also abandoned utter- ances, but i~edistely followed by usually syntac- tically and semantically ... justified to quit the search for an almost perfect grnmm,r, it would be a mistake to constrain it to the constructions used. Improved naturalness can be achieved with diagnostics, definitions, and ... performance and user satisfaction. System response times are a very important measure. The ques- tionnaire method can and has been used (in the case of MT and USL), but as yet there is too little...
... unfeasible to assume that any task expert can simply perform a ~memory dump" of expertise into some naturallanguage interface and be done with it. This paper discusses the naturallanguage ... Thompson, C.W. Usable Natural Language Interfaces Through Menu-Based Namra/ Language Understanding. Proceedings of the Human Factors in Computer ~,, ystem.t Conference, Boston, MA, 1983, 190-192. ... lexical-functional sem~aics (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982) to translate to the internal form of representation, and an interface that includes left- corner parsitlg with in-line guidance to address the Linguistic...
... techniques for transportable natural- language interfaces. The goal of transportability is to enable nonspeciallsts to adapt a natural- language processing system for access toan existing conventional ... extension of the language- processlng and data access components that make it possible for an end user to query the new database in natural language. A major benefit of using naturallanguage is ... question as a REQUEST to INFORM (an analysis done in [Cohen and Perrault, 1979] to allow planning of questions, taking into account plans and goals of both speakers and hearers), with REQUEST...
... 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 ... assert the existence of an instance or of an attribute value as in (I0) and ([1). I. 2 INSTANCES An instance of a structured object is represented as a tree. Instances are created piece-meal ... that RANGE, UNIT and QVALSET are replaced instances and incorporates them into the growing instance by VALSET. One or more members of VALSET are to be of GLAUCOMA-PATIENT. Ibis is due to the...
... cognitively less demanding task for a user to correct a previous utterance than to repeat an explicit sequence of commands (or worse yet, to detect and undo explicitly each and every unwanted consequence ... to provide flexible naturallanguage access (comprehension and generation) to the XSEL expert system [15]. XSEL, the Digital Equipment Corporation's automated salesman's assistant, ... linked to each other and a transaction log file 164 that kept a record of all interactions. The user wassituated at one terminal and was told he or she was communicating with a real natural language...
... planned or edlted their languageto be as complete and formal as in the Human-Computer dialogues, and more complete and formal than the language in Typed Human-Human dialogues. This is the ... of typing in utterances to determine when naturallanguage in- terfaces are effective interfacesto advisory systems. On the other hand, the natural restrictions on the language produced by ... Spoken Face -to- Face, Typed Human-Human (terminal -to- terminal) with both conversants knowing their counterpart was human, and Human-Computer using the REL naturallanguage front-end. The task...