Lightweight Natural Language Database Interfaces

Most natural language database interfaces suffer from the translation knowledge portability problem, and are vulnerable to ill-formed questions because of their deep analysis. To alleviate those problems, this paper proposes a lightweight approach to natural language interfaces, where translation knowledge is semi-automatically acquired and user questions are only syntactically analyzed. For the acquisition of translation knowledge, first, a target database is reverse-engineered into a physical database schema on which domain experts annotate linguistic descriptions to produce a pER (physically-derived EntityRelationship) schema. Next, from the pER schema, initial translation knowledge is automatically extracted. Then, it is extended with synonyms from lexical databases. In the stage of question answering, this semi-automatically constructed translation knowledge is then used to resolve translation ambiguities.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NLDB
• Authors: In-Su Kang, Seung-Hoon Na, Jong-Hyeok Lee, Gijoo Yang
• Keywords: Natural Language, NLDB 2004, Translation Knowledge, Translation Knowledge Portability