Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces To Databases

Natural language interfaces to databases are not in couunon use today for two main reasons: they are difficult to use and they are expensive to build and maintain. This paper presents a functional overview of a new kind of natural language interface that goes far in overcoming both of these problems. The “ease-of-use” problem is solved by wedding a menu-based interaction technique to a traditional semantic graaauar-driven natural language system. Using this approach, all user queries are “understood” by the system. The “creation and maintenance problem” is solved by designing a core grannnar with parameters supplied by the data dictionary and then automatically generating semantic graumars covering some selected subpart of the user’s data. Automatically generated natural language interfaces offer the user an attractive way to group semantically related tables together, to model a user’s access rights, and to model a user's view of supported joins paths in a database.