STUDIES IN THE EVALUATION OF A DOMAIN-INDEPENDENT NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERY SYSTEM

There is growing consensus that some of the most crucial questions concerning the feasibility and desirability of natural language interfaces to databases can only be resolved by empirical research. This paper reports the results of several empirical studies which investigated the same domain-independent natural language query system, using various applications in two different natural languages - English and German. Taken together, these experiments involved about 100 subjects and over 12,000 queries, constituting the bulk of empirical evaluations of natural query language systems reported to date. Some definitive results are derived from the combined experience, and plans are outlined to resolve several of the remaining issues.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

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

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

Program conversing in Portugese providing a library service

TUGA is a program which converses in Portuguese to provide a library service covering the field of Artificial Intelligence. The objective of designing the program TUGA was the development of a feasible method for consulting and creating data bases in natural Portuguese. The resulting program allows dialogues where the program and its users behave in the way humans normally do in a dialogue setting. The program can answer/ and question in pre-defined scenarios. Users can question/ answer and issue commands in a natural and convenient way/ without bothering excessively with the form of the dialogues and sentences. The original contributions of this work are: the treatment of dialogues. the adaptation of Colmerauer's natural language framework to Portuguese, the particular method for evaluating the logical structures involved in Colmerauer's framework, and the library service application itself. The program is implemented in Prolog, a simple and surprisingly powerful programming language essentially identical in syntax and semantics to a subset of predicate calculus in clausal form

SLEMS : a knowledge based approach to soil loss estimation and modelling

ThesisThesis (M.Sc.E.), University of New Brunswick, 199