Prepositions and Conjunctions in a Natural Language Interfaces to Databases

摘要

This paper present the treatment of prepositions and conjunctions in natural language interfaces todatabases(NLIDB) that allows better translation of queries expressed in natural language into formal languages. Prepositions and conjunctions weren't sufficiently studied for their usage in NLIDBs, because most of the NLIDBs just look for keywords in the sentences and focus their analysis on nouns and verbs getting rid of auxiliary words in the query. This paper shows that prepositions and conjunctions can be represented as operations using formal set theory. Additionally, since prepositions and conjunctions keep their meaning in any context, their treatment is domain independent. In our experiments we used Spanish language. We validate our approach using two databases; Northwind and Pubs of SQL Server, with a corpus of 198 different queries for the first one and 70 queries for the second one. The 84% of queries were translated correctly for the database Northwind and 80% for Pubs.