Summarizing Natural Language Database Responses

In a human dialogue it is usually considered inappropriate if one conversant monopolizes the conversation. Similarly it can be inappropriate for a natural language database interface to respond with a lengthy list of data. A non-enumerative "summary" response is less verbose and often avoids misleading the user where an extensional response might. In this paper we investigate the problem of generating such discourse-oriented concise responses. We present details of the design and implementation of a system that produces summary responses to queries of a relational data base. The system employs a set of heuristics that work in conjunction with a knowledge base to discover underlying regularities that form the basis of summary responses. The system is largely domain-independent, and hence can be ported relatively easily from one data base to another. It can handle a wide variety of situations requiring a summary response and can be readily extended. It also has a number of shortcomings which are discussed thoroughly and which form the basis for a number of suggested research directions.