Algorithms to Improve Performance of Natural Language Interface

Performance of Natural Language Interface often deteriorates due to linguistic phenomena of Semantic Symmetry and Ambiguous Modification (Katz and Lin, 2003). In this paper we present algorithms to handle problems caused by semantic symmetry and ambiguous modification. Use of these algorithms has improved the precision of Natural Language Interface. Proposed shallow parsing based algorithms reduce the amount of syntactic processing required to deal with problems caused by semantic symmetry and ambiguous modification. These algorithms need only POS (Part of Speech) information that is generated by shallow parsing of corpus text. Results are compared with the results of basic Natural Language Interface without such algorithm. Dealing with linguistic phenomena using shallow parsing is a novel approach as we overcome the usual brittleness ass ociated with in depth parsing. We also present computational results that produced comparative charts based on answers extracted for a same query posed to these two systems.