Abstract

Natural language interfaces (NLI's) to databases allow end-users to access information in databases by typing in commands and requests in a natural language. These commands and requests are then translated into some formal database language, most commonly SQL. NLI's suffer from the same linguistic and computational problems as other natural language processing systems, though the severity of some problems is reduced due to the restricted language used and the restricted domain of discourse. Another important issue for database interfaces concerns porting them to new domains or to other natural languages. This thesis introduces a lexicalist approach to database NLI's based on unification grammars, along with a small-scale example. A sample bilingual lexicon is proposed, to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. The solution proposed shows that a lexicalist approach is not only feasible but, for unambiguous words and expressions, can result in reasonable complexity and processing...

Citations