Multilingual Access to Online Help Systems and Databases

In this paper we present the AMSABEL system, a natural language based information retrieval system. AMSABEL provides access to data stored in a relational database using unrestricted natural language. Queries can be expressed in either, English or Spanish, thereby providing direct access to the database for non-expert users. The system relies on machine learning techniques to translate the original query from natural language into a structured query language and, therefore, does not depend on the contents of the database, as long as training data is available.