DBMSs Should Talk Back Too

Natural language user interfaces to database systems have been studied for several decades now. They have mainly focused on parsing and interpreting natural language queries to generate them in a formal database language. We envision the reverse functionality, where the system would be able to take the internal result of that translation, say in SQL form, translate it back into natural language, and show it to the initiator of the query for verification. Likewise, information extraction has received considerable attention in the past ten years or so, identifying structured information in free text so that it may then be stored appropriately and queried. Validation of the records stored with a backward translation into text would again be very powerful. Verification and validation of query and data input of a database system correspond to just one example of the many important applications that would benefit greatly from having mature techniques for translating such database constructs...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CIDR
• Authors: Alkis Simitsis, Yannis E. Ioannidis
• Keywords: CIDR 2007, CIDR 2009, Database System, Natural Language, Natural Language Queries