Natural Language Access to Data Bases: Interpreting Update Requests

For natural language data base systems to operate effectively in practical domains, they must have the capabilities required by real applications. One such capability is understanding and performing update requests. The processing of natural language updates raises problems not encountered in the processing of queries. These difficulties stem from the fact that the user will naturally phrase requests with respect to his conception of the domain, which may be a considerable simplification of the actual underlying data base structure. Updates that are meaningful and unambiguous from the user's standpoint may not translate into reasonable changes to the underlying data base. Update requests may be impossible (cannot be performed in any way), ambiguous (can be performed in several ways), or pathological (can be performed only in ways that cause undesirable side effects).