Natural language interface construction using semantic grammars

Abstract

This paper is a study on constructing a natural language interface to relational databases, which accepts natural language questions as inputs and generates textual responses. The question is translated into a SQL query using a semantic grammar and then, a database management system is left to find the result table with its own specialized optimization and planning techniques. The textual responses are generated from the result table based on another semantic grammar and the query type. Experimental results show that this approach can analyze a wide range of questions with high accuracy and produce reasonable textual responses. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.