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Lightweight Natural Language Database Interfaces

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Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3136))

Abstract

Most natural language database interfaces suffer from the translation knowledge portability problem, and are vulnerable to ill-formed questions because of their deep analysis. To alleviate those problems, this paper proposes a lightweight approach to natural language interfaces, where translation knowledge is semi-automatically acquired and user questions are only syntactically analyzed. For the acquisition of translation knowledge, first, a target database is reverse-engineered into a physical database schema on which domain experts annotate linguistic descriptions to produce a pER (physically-derived Entity-Relationship) schema. Next, from the pER schema, initial translation knowledge is automatically extracted. Then, it is extended with synonyms from lexical databases. In the stage of question answering, this semi-automatically constructed translation knowledge is then used to resolve translation ambiguities.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kang, IS., Na, SH., Lee, JH., Yang, G. (2004). Lightweight Natural Language Database Interfaces. In: Meziane, F., Métais, E. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3136. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27779-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27779-8_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22564-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-27779-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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