Information access needs to be uncomplicated, users rather use incorrect data which is easily received than correct information which is harder to obtain. Querying bibliographic metadata from digital libraries mainly supports simple textual queries. A user's demand for answering more sophisticated queries could be fulfilled by the usage of SQL. As such means are highly complex and challenging even for trained programmers, a domain-specific query language is needed to provide a straightforward way to access data. In this paper we present SchenQL, a simple query language focused on bibliographic metadata in the area of computer science while using the vocabulary of domain-experts. By facilitating a plain syntax and fundamental aggregate functions, we propose an easy-to-learn domain-specific query language capable of search and exploration. It is suitable for domain-experts as well as casual users while still providing the possibility to answer complicated queries. A user study with computer scientists directly compared our query language to SQL and clearly demonstrated SchenQL's suitability and usefulness for given queries as well as users' acceptance.
Whether it be translation of natural language for the formulation of XQuery @cite_17 , the processing of identified language parts to build parse trees @cite_20 , the representation of natural language queries posed to digital libraries in SPARQL @cite_19 or the recent audio to SQL translation available for different databases and domains @cite_7 , is an active field of research. Our proposed DSL does not translate natural language to SQL but offers a syntax which is similar to natural language.
@cite_19 @cite_7 @cite_20 @cite_17
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We describe the construction of a generic natural language query interface to an XML database. Our interface can accept an arbitrary English sentence as a query, which can be quite complex and include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression. The translation is based on mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens in the parse tree of the query sentence to proximity of corresponding elements in the XML data to be retrieved. Our experimental assessment, through a user study, demonstrates that this type of natural language interface is good enough to be usable now, with no restrictions on the application domain. Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over tabular spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. This paper describes the design and implementation of a robust natural language based interface to spreadsheet programming. Our methodology involves designing a typed domain-specific language (DSL) that supports an expressive algebra of map, filter, reduce, join, and formatting capabilities at a level of abstraction appropriate for non-expert users. The key algorithmic component of our methodology is a translation algorithm for converting a natural language specification in the context of a given spreadsheet to a ranked set of likely programs in the DSL. The translation algorithm leverages the spreadsheet spatial and temporal context to assign interpretations to specifications with implicit references, and is thus robust to a variety of ways in which end users can express the same task. The translation algorithm builds over ideas from keyword programming and semantic parsing to achieve both high precision and high recall. We implemented the system as an Excel add-in called NLyze that supports a rich user interaction model including annotating the user's natural language specification and explaining the synthesized DSL programs by paraphrasing them into structured English. We collected a total of 3570 English descriptions for 40 spreadsheet tasks and our system was able to generate the intended interpretation as the top candidate for 94 (97 for the top 3) of those instances. We present translation results on the shared task "Exploiting Parallel Texts for Statistical Machine Translation" generated by a chart parsing decoder operating on phrase tables augmented and generalized with target language syntactic categories. We use a target language parser to generate parse trees for each sentence on the target side of the bilingual training corpus, matching them with phrase table lattices built for the corresponding source sentence. Considering phrases that correspond to syntactic categories in the parse trees we develop techniques to augment (declare a syntactically motivated category for a phrase pair) and generalize (form mixed terminal and nonterminal phrases) the phrase table into a synchronous bilingual grammar. We present results on the French-to-English task for this workshop, representing significant improvements over the workshop's baseline system. Our translation system is available open-source under the GNU General Public License. Objective : Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. @PARASPLIT Design : The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. @PARASPLIT Measurements : The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. @PARASPLIT Results : Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system(combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70 and 87 . Training of the query component increased recall to 85 without changing precision.