Abstract
Natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) allow inexperienced users to formulate questions in natural language (NL) to DB management systems. A survey of the literature on NLIDBs shows that the prevalence of the interfaces developed to date are limited by two aspects: it is difficult to port them from one database (DB) to another, and they fail on some questions, either because they misinterpret the questions or they are unable to respond even when the answer exists. Among the problems that occur in NL questions, there is a problem that may arise when querying complex DBs: semantically implied entities. This problem is related to the semantic meaning of a query, when upon referring to an entity (DB table), another entity (or entities) is semantically implied to which the first entity is related, and usually the user ignores the relationship between the two (or more) entities. This chapter describes a method for using a virtual view in a NLIDB, which allows processing queries that involve this problem more efficiently than a previous version of the interface that uses materialized views. Specifically, experimental results show that the new version reduces by 23% the time for translating questions from NL to SQL.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Androutsopoulos, I., Ritchie, G., Thanisch, P.: Natural language interface to database, an introduction. J. Nat. Lang. Eng. 29–81 (1995)
Llopis, M., Ferrández, A.: How to make a natural language interface to query databases accessible to everyone: an example. Comput. Stand. Interfaces Elsevier 35, 470–481 (2012)
Esquivel, I., Córdoba, R., González, D., Ogarita, E.: SNL2SQL: Conversión de consultas en SQL al idioma Español, In: Congreso Internacional de Investigación, vol. 5, no. 3, Chiapas, Mexico (2013). ISSN 1946–5351
Li, F., Jagadish, H.V.: Constructing an interactive natural language interface for relational databases. In: Proceedings of VLDB Endow, vol. 8 (2014)
J.D. O’Shea, K. Shabaz, K.A. Crockett, Aneesah: A conversational natural language interface to databases, in Proceedings of World Congress on Engineering 2015, vol. 1, London (2015)
Amsterdamer, Y., Kukliansky, A., Milo, T.: A natural language interface for querying general and individual knowledge. In: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, vol. 8, no. 12 (2015)
ElSayed, K.: An arabic natural language interface system for a database of the holy Quran. Int. J. Adv. Res. Artif. Intell. (IJARAI), 4(7) (2015)
Kataria, A., Nath, R.: Natural language interface for databases in hindi based on Karaka theory. Int. J. Comput. Appl. 122(7) (2015) (India)
Pazos, R.A., González, J.J., Aguirre, M.A.: Semantic model for improving the performance of natural language interfaces to databases. In: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 7094 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martínez F., J.A., Pazos R., R.A., Puga, H., Gaspar H., J. (2020). Development of a Virtual View for Processing Complex Natural Language Queries. In: Castillo, O., Melin, P., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Intuitionistic and Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Enhancements in Neural and Optimization Algorithms: Theory and Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 862. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35445-9_49
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35445-9_49
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35444-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35445-9
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)