Abstract
Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs) are tools that can be useful in making decisions, allowing different types of users to get information they need using natural language communication. Despite their important features and that for more than 50 years NLIDBs have been developed, their acceptance by end users is very low due to extremely complex problems inherent to natural language, their customization and internal operation, which has produced poor performance regarding queries correctly translated. This chapter presents a study on the main desirable features that NLIDBs should have as well as their pitfalls, describing some study cases that occur in some interfaces to illustrate the flaws of their approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Pazos, R., González, J., Aguirre, M., Martínez, J., Fraire, H.: Natural language interfaces to databases: an analysis of the state of the art. Recent Adv. Hybrid Intell. Syst. Stud. Comput. Intell. 451, 463–480 (2013)
Reis, P., Mamede, N., Matias, J.: Edite: a natural language interface to databases: a new dimension for an old approach. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Tourism (1997)
Pazos, R., González, J., Aguirre, M.: Semantic model for improving the performance of natural language interfaces. In: Proceedings of the MICAI 2011 Mexican International Conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 277–290 (2011)
Jain, H.: Hindi language interface to databases. Master’s thesis, Thapar University (2011)
Kovacs, L.: SQL generation for natural language interface. J. Comput. Sci. Control Syst. 2(18), 19–22 (2009)
Meng, X., Wang, S.: NChiql: the Chinese natural language interface to databases. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2113, pp. 145–154 (2001)
Boldasov, M., Sokolova, E., Malkovsky, M.: User query understanding by the InBASE system as a source for a multilingual NL generation module. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 2448, 33–40 (2002)
Jung, H., Geunbae, G.: Multilingual question answering with high portability on relational databases. In: Proceedings Conference on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering 19, pp. 1–8 (2002)
Kwiatkowski, T., Zettlemoyer, L., Goldwater, S., Steedman, M.: Inducing probabilistic CCG grammars from logical form with higher-order unification. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1223–1233 (2010)
Padró Ll., Stanilovsky, E.: FreeLing 3.0: towards wider multilinguality. In: Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (2012)
Pakray, P.: Keyword based multilingual restricted domain question answering. Master’s thesis, Jadavpur University (2007)
Hallet, C., Scott, D., Power, R.: Composing questions through conceptual authoring. Comput. Linguist. 33, 105–133 (2007)
Tang, L., Mooney, R.: Using multiple clause constructors in inductive logic programming for semantic parsing. In: Proceedings of 12th European Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 466–477 (2001)
Price, P.: Evaluation of spoken language systems: the ATIS domain. In: Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, pp. 91–95
Clarke, J., Goldwasser, D., Chang, M.W., Roth, D.: Driving semantic parsing from the world’s response. In: Proceedings 14th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 18–27 (2010)
Giordani, A., Moschitti, A.: Translating questions to SQL queries with generative parsers discriminatively reranked. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Linguistics (Posters), 401–410 (2012)
Kate, R., Mooney, R.: Using string-kernels for learning semantic parsers. In Proceedings of 21st ICCL and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 913–920 (2006)
Liang, P., Jordan, M., Klein, D.: Learning dependency-based compositional semantics. In: Proceedings of 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 590–599 (2011)
Lu, W., Tou, H.N., Lee, W.S., Zettlemoyer, L.: A generative model for parsing natural language to meaning representations. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 783–792 (2008)
Kaufman, E., Bernstein, A., Fischer, L.: NLP-Reduce: A “naïve” but domain-independent natural language interface for querying ontologies. In: Proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference, pp. 1–2 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pazos Rangel, R.A., Aguirre, M.A., González, J.J., Carpio, J.M. (2014). Features and Pitfalls that Users Should Seek in Natural Language Interfaces to Databases. In: Castillo, O., Melin, P., Pedrycz, W., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Recent Advances on Hybrid Approaches for Designing Intelligent Systems. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 547. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05170-3_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05170-3_44
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05169-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05170-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)