Abstract
Since the 1970’s, there has been growing interest in understanding and answering human language questions. Despite this, little progress has been made in developing an interface that any untrained user can use to query very large databases using natural language. In this research, the design of a novel system is discussed. Tree-like structures are built for every question and each query, and a tree kernel, which represents trees in terms of their substructures, is used to define feature spaces. A machine learning algorithm is proposed that takes pairs of trees as training input and derives the unknown final SQL query by matching propositional and relational substructures.
Ph.D. advisor: Periklis Andritsos, University of Trento, Italy. periklis@disi.unitn.it
Chapter PDF
References
Androutsopoulos, I., Ritchie, G., Thanisch, P.: MASQUE/SQL - An Efficient and Portable Natural Language Query Interface for Relational Databases. In: 6th Int. Conf. on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (1993)
Copestake, A., Sparck-Jones, K.: Natural language interfaces to databases. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 225–249 (1990)
Dittenbach, M., Merkl, W., Berger, H.: A natural language query interface for tourism information. In: Int. Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism, pp. 152–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Filipe, P., Mamede, N.: Databases and Natural Language Interfaces. V Jornadas de Bases de Datos. Valladolid (2000)
Gonzalez, B.J.J., Pazos, R.R.A., Cruz, C.I.C., Fraire, H.H.J.: Issues in Translating from Natural Language to SQL in a Domain-Independent Natural Language Interface to Databases. In: Gelbukh, A., Reyes-Garcia, C.A. (eds.) MICAI 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4293, pp. 922–931. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Li, Y., Yang, H., Jagadish, H.: NaLIX: an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML. In: ACM SIGMOD, Baltimore (2005)
Pazos, R.R.A., Gelbukh, A.F., González, B.J.J., Alarcón, R.E., Mendoza, M.A., Domínguez, S.A.P.: Spanish Natural Language Interface for a Relational Database Querying System. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds.) TSD 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2448, pp. 123–130. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Popescu, A.M., Etzioni, O., Kautz, H.: Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases. In: 8th International Conference on Intelligent user interfaces. Miami (2003)
Zanzotto, F.M., Moschitti, A.: Automatic learning of textual entailments with cross-pair similarities. In: 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney (2006)
EasyAsk (a.k.a. English Wizard), http://www.easyask.com
English Query, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/
English Language Front End (VB-ELF), http://www.elfsoft.com
SQ-HAL, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/hons/projects/2000/Supun.Ruwanpura/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Giordani, A. (2008). Mapping Natural Language into SQL in a NLIDB. In: Kapetanios, E., Sugumaran, V., Spiliopoulou, M. (eds) Natural Language and Information Systems. NLDB 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5039. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69858-6_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69858-6_46
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69857-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69858-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)