TY - GEN
T1 - Customization of natural language interfaces to databases
T2 - 10th Mexican International Conference on Computer Science, ENC 2009
AU - Marceleño, José Antonio Zárate
AU - Gelbukh, Alexander
AU - Pazos R., Rodolfo A.
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - The first Natural Language Interfaces to Databases were built and designed for specific domains, and their customization processes implied source code manipulation. Open systems and database inter-operability enabled these interfaces to be independent of the operating system and database management system, and the separation of the knowledge base from the translation process allowed for domain portability. Although commercial interfaces incorporate semi-automatic configuration wizards that help configure the interface without knowledge of its inner workings or its source code, it is still difficult to customize these interfaces for a given database, due to confusion on the information that is necessary to provide to the knowledge base of the interface in order to make it able to answer some query category. For solving this problem, we propose an ontology whose design is simple and flexible enough to assist the customizer's work. This paper describes the design of the ontology, as well as an empirical evaluation of this approach versus the customization process of a commercial interface. The evaluation was useful to detect problems with different types of queries used to retrieve information from a specific database. In spite of the difficulties found to make the evaluations and some unquestionable advantages offered by commercial interfaces.
AB - The first Natural Language Interfaces to Databases were built and designed for specific domains, and their customization processes implied source code manipulation. Open systems and database inter-operability enabled these interfaces to be independent of the operating system and database management system, and the separation of the knowledge base from the translation process allowed for domain portability. Although commercial interfaces incorporate semi-automatic configuration wizards that help configure the interface without knowledge of its inner workings or its source code, it is still difficult to customize these interfaces for a given database, due to confusion on the information that is necessary to provide to the knowledge base of the interface in order to make it able to answer some query category. For solving this problem, we propose an ontology whose design is simple and flexible enough to assist the customizer's work. This paper describes the design of the ontology, as well as an empirical evaluation of this approach versus the customization process of a commercial interface. The evaluation was useful to detect problems with different types of queries used to retrieve information from a specific database. In spite of the difficulties found to make the evaluations and some unquestionable advantages offered by commercial interfaces.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77952719300&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ENC.2009.52
DO - 10.1109/ENC.2009.52
M3 - Contribución a la conferencia
AN - SCOPUS:77952719300
SN - 9780769538822
T3 - Proceedings of the Mexican International Conference on Computer Science
SP - 373
EP - 378
BT - 10th Mexican International Conference on Computer Science, ENC 2009
PB - IEEE Computer Society
Y2 - 21 September 2009 through 25 September 2009
ER -