Building natural language responses from natural language questions in the spatio-temporal context

Abstract

With the evolving research in geographic information system (GIS) owing to its ability to support decision makers in different fields, there is a strong need to enabling all users; specialists and non-specialists to profit from this technology. Although, the key impediment to non-specialists is the language to interact with the GIS and especially its embedded geographic database (GDB) which require SQL skills. In this paper we explore a new approach which alleviates nomad GIS users from any formatting effort by only using the natural language as a GDB communication mean. The process is generally two-fold: 1) formatting the natural language user query to be processed by the GDB engine; 2) translating the GDB retrieved answer to a text easily interpreted by all GIS users. The resulting implemented system was integrated to the OpenJump GIS and has been evaluated to give satisfactory results.