Natural Language Interfaces to Databases - An Introduction

This paper is an introduction to natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs). A brief overview of the history of NLIDBs is first given. Some advantages and disadvantages of NLIDBs are then discussed, comparing NLIDBs to formal query languages, form-based interfaces, and graphical interfaces. An introduction to some of the linguistic problems NLIDBs have to confront follows, for the benefit of readers less familiar with computational linguistics. The discussion then moves on to NLIDB architectures, portability issues, restricted natural language input systems (including menu-based NLIDBs), and NLIDBs with reasoning capabilities. Some less explored areas of NLIDB research are then presented, namely database updates, meta-knowledge questions, temporal questions, and multi-modal NLIDBs. The paper ends with reflections on the current state of the art.