Unlike most user-computer interfaces, a natural language interface allows users to communicate fluently with a computer system with very little preparation. Databases are often hard to use in cooperating with the users because of their rigid interface. A good NLIDB allows a user to enter commands and ask questions in native language and then after interpreting respond to the user in native lang...

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 traditio...

The current state-of-the-art method for generating educational content, such as math word problems and hints, is manual authoring by domain experts. Unfortunately, this is costly, time consuming, and produces content that lacks diversity. Attempts to automatically address the time and diversity issues through natural language generation still do not produce content that is sufficiently creative...

This paper presents a novel approach to categorize, model and identify contextual information in natural language interface to database (NLIDB) systems. The interactions between user and system are categorized and modeled based on the way in which the contextual information is utilized in the interactions. A relationship schema among the responses (user and system responses) is proposed. We pre...

The inevitable proliferation of expert systems underscores the need for robust, friendly interfaces requiring minimal user training. The objective of the XCALIBUR project is to meet this need by providing natural comprehension and generation in the context of a focused mixed-initiative dialog. The XCALIBUR architecture is discussed, including its three central components (parser, generator and ...

In this paper we present a natural language interface architecture, which is used for accessing FAQ knowledge bases. Since one of the main obstacles to the efficient use of natural language interfaces is the high amount of required manual knowledge engineering, we provide an adaptive architecture to automate the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We apply a machine learning module based on an...

This paper describes a natural language interface to database systems which is based on the query formation capabilities of a High-level Query Formulator. The formulator relies on the Semantic Graph of the database, which is a model of the data stored in the database. The natural language interface accepts a user input in natural language and extracts the necessary information needed by the for...

Natural language interface to spatial databases have not received a lot of attention in computational linguistics, in spite of the potential value of such systems for users of Geographical Information Systems (GISs). This paper presents a controlled language for GIS queries, solves some of the semantic problems for spatial inference in this language, and introduces a system that implements this...

Speech-based interfaces have great potential but are hampered by problems related to spoken language such as variability, noise and ambiguity. Speech Graffiti was designed to address these issues via a structured, universal interface protocol for interacting with simple machines. Since Speech Graffiti requires that users speak to the system in a certain way, we were interested in how users migh...

A fast responsiveness system incurs minimum latency and produces high throughput and quick response. Interacting with these systems using friendly natural language interfaces requires nat­ ural language (NL) capability and an NL processing component. Examples of fast responsive systems include mission-critical systems like aerospace applications and real-time text messaging applications. The NL...