NChiql: The Chinese natural language interface to databases

Abstract

Numerous natural language interface to databases (NLIDBs) developed in the mid-eighties demonstrated impressive characteristic in certain application areas, but NLIDBs did not gained the expected rapid and wide commercial acceptance. We argue that there are two good reasons explain why: limited portability and poor usability. This paper describes the design and implementation of NChiql, a Chinese natural language interface to databases. In order to bright the essence of these problems, we provide an abstract model (AM) in NChiql. We try to give a solution for these problems based on the model in our system. In this paper, we depict a novel method based on database semantics (SCM) to handle the Chinese natural language query, which greatly promotes the system’s usability. The experiments show that NChiql has good usability and high correctness.