Natural Language Interface to Database using Semantic Matching

Information is playing an important role in our lives. One of the major sources of information is databases. Databases and database technology are having major impact on the growing use of computers. In order to retrieve information from a database, one needs to formulate a query in such way that the computer will understand and produce the desired output. The Structured Query Language (SQL) norms are been pursued in almost all languages for relational database systems. However, not everybody is able to write SQL queries as they may not be aware of the structure of the database. So there is a need for non-expert users to query relational databases in their natural language instead of working with the values of the attributes. The idea of using natural language instead of SQL, has promoted the development of Natural Language Interface to Database systems (NLIDB). The need of NLIDB is increasing day by day as more and more people access information through web browsers, PDA’s and cell phones. In this paper we introduce an intelligent interface for database. We prove that our NLIDB is guaranteed to map a natural language query to the corresponding SQL query. We have tested our system on Northwind database and show that our NLIDB compares favourably with MS English Query product.