A Portable Natural Language Interface for Diverse Databases Using Ontologies

The growth of user needs for accessing information resources, the technological advance in this field, and the limitations of graphical and formbased interfaces, motivate the proposal of new solutions and the revision of several others in order to solve one of the main problems in computer applications: human-machine interface. Natural language processing has experienced a new impulse in recent years, and it is proposed as the best solution for the aforementioned problem. The first results of a project for developing a natural language interface to databases are presented, which is an extension of a larger project aimed at developing user interfaces for facilitating access to databases via Internet. In this project the use of ontologies is proposed as a means for making the interface portable to different databases, contributing in this manner to facilitate the configuration task for this type of interfaces, which is one of the main factors that have limited their application. In this paper the conceptual architecture of a natural language interface to databases on the Internet is described as well as the development attained.