skip to main content
10.1145/1066157.1066281acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmodConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

NaLIX: an interactive natural language interface for querying XML

Published:14 June 2005Publication History

ABSTRACT

Database query languages can be intimidating to the non-expert, leading to the immense recent popularity for keyword based search in spite of its significant limitations. The holy grail has been the development of a natural language query interface. We present NaLIX, a generic interactive natural language query interface to an XML database. Our system can accept an arbitrary English language sentence as query input, which can include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression that can be evaluated against an XML database. The translation is done through mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens to proximity of corresponding elements in the result XML. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIX, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to handle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed features in NaLIX facilitate the interactive query process and improve the usability of the interface.

References

  1. Timber: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/db/timber/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. WordNet: http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. XML Query Use Cases: http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-use-cases/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. I. Androutsopoulos, G. Ritchie, and P. Thanisch. Natural language interfaces to databases - an introduction. Journal of Language Engineering, 1(1):29--81, 1995.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. A. Burton-Jones, V. Storey, V. Sugumaran, and S. Purao. Á heuristic-based methodology for semantic augmentation of user queries on the Web. In ER2003, 2003.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Y. Li, H. Yang, and H. Jagadish. Constructing a Generic Natural Language Interface for an XML Database. Submitted.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Y. Li, C. Yu, and H. V. Jagadish. Schema-Free XQuery. In VLDB, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. D. Lin. Dependency-based evaluation of MINIPAR. In Workshop on the Evaluation of Parsing Systems, 1998.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. P. V. R. Navigli. An analysis of ontology-based query expansion strategies. In IJCAI, 2003.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. J. R. Remde, L. M. Gomez, and T. K. Landauer. Superbook: an automatic tool for information exploration - hypertext? In Hypertext, 1987. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  1. NaLIX: an interactive natural language interface for querying XML

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGMOD '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
      June 2005
      990 pages
      ISBN:1595930604
      DOI:10.1145/1066157
      • Conference Chair:
      • Fatma Ozcan

      Copyright © 2005 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 14 June 2005

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • Article

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate785of4,003submissions,20%

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader