Natural Language Interface for a PROLOG Database

摘要

A natural language (NL) interface to a relational database was developed with careful consideration given to the human factors needed to aid a novice user in accessing data. The entire system is written in DEC-10 PROLOG, with three distinguishing contributions: A simple grammar was developed to parse phrases like: 'Officers where rank is Captain and status is single and age is less than 32'; The developed NL compiler accepts English phrases or commands as queries and translates them into PROLOG; The human factors that contribute to the system are: a help file to aid user perception of the data, a simple grammar, an interactive view of all retrieved tuples, two forms of ellipsis, user-defined aliases, and limited use of quantifiers.