Comprehensible Answers to Precis Queries

摘要

Users without knowledge of schemas or query languages have difficulties in accessing information stored in databases. Commercial and research efforts have focused on keyword-based searches. Among them, precis queries generate entire multi-relation databases, which are logical subsets of existing ones, instead of individual relations. The logical database subset contains not only items directly related to the query selections but also items implicitly related to them in various ways. Earlier work has identified the need of providing the naive user with meaningful answers to his questions and has suggested the translation of precis query answer in narrative form. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic method that translates the relational output of a precis query into a synthesis of results. We describe a translator engine that uses a template mechanism for generating a precis in a narrative form through a set of reusable templates.