Proceedings of a Workshop on Natural Language for Interaction with Data Bases, January 10-14, 1977

Abstract

This Report is a collection of papers presented at the "Workshop on Natural Language for Interaction with Data Bases" held at IIASA in Laxenburg, Austria from January 10 to 14, 1977. The papers describe the research and results in attempting to produce a viable, useful, and flexible interface to various systems in Europe (acronymically AQL, PLIDIS, USL, DONAU, DILOS, KAIFAS, etc.) and in North America (OWL, INGRES, and LIFER). Most of these interfaces present to the user the feeling of working in an environment of relatively free and forgiving syntax. This is in marked contrast to the rather rigid syntax required by most commercial data base systems in their natural (mostly English) query languages. In addition there are discussions of the categorization of the semantic relationships within some natural languages as an aid to both understanding and knowledge representation