A natural language interface is directed toward the database query languages that access machine stored data. A pattern driven transformation mechanism supports natural language access. A natural language is mapped onto a more formal computer database language. A human-like "understanding" of the query statement is not required. The transformation mechanism is separate from the target database ...

It is assumed that by focusing on retrieval at a granularity lower than documents that XML-IR systems will better satisfy users’ information need than traditional IR systems. Participates in INEX’s Ad-hoc track develop XMLIR systems based upon this assumption, using an evaluation methodology in the tradition of Cranfield. However, since the inception of INEX, debate has raged on how applicable ...

For five years t h e End-User Friendly Interface to Data management (EUFID) project team at System Development Corporation worked on the design and implementation of a Natural-Language Interface (NLI) system that was to be independent of both the application and the database management system. In this paper we describe application, natural-language and d a t a b a s e management problems involv...

A frustrating event in the course of interaction with a database management system is query failure: a query is submitted to the database, but instead of the anticipated printout, the system responds with an empty set of da ta items. While such null answers are always correct from a technical'point of view, quite often they are unsatisfactory. Most efforts to deal with this problem have been in...

The challenge stated in the title can be divided into two main problems. The first problem is to reliably mimic the way that users interact with user interfaces. The second problem is to build an instructible agent, i.e. one that can be taught to execute tasks expressed as previously unseen natural language commands. This paper proposes a solution to the second problem, a system we call Helpa. ...

We present Flipper, a natural language interface for describing high level task specifications for robots that are compiled into robot actions. Flipper starts with a formal core language for task planning that allows expressing rich temporal specifications and uses a semantic parser to provide a natural language interface. Flipper provides immediate visual feedback by executing an automatically...

In this paper we present a novel multiple-taxonomy question classification system, facing the challenge of assigning categories in multiple taxonomies to natural language questions. We applied our system to category search on faceted information. The system provides a natural language interface to faceted information, detecting the categories requested by the user and narrowing down the documen...