Features and pitfalls that users should seek in natural language interfaces to databases

Abstract

Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs) are tools that can be useful in making decisions, allowing different types of users to get information they need using natural language communication. Despite their important features and that for more than 50 years NLIDBs have been developed, their acceptance by end users is very low due to extremely complex problems inherent to natural language, their customization and internal operation, which has produced poor performance regarding queries correctly translated. This chapter presents a study on the main desirable features that NLIDBs should have as well as their pitfalls, describing some study cases that occur in some interfaces to illustrate the flaws of their approach.