Abstract
We present a natural language question/answering system to interface the University of Évora databases that uses clarification dialogs in order to clarify user questions. It was developed in an integrated logic programming framework, based on constraint logic programming using the GnuProlog(-cx) language [2,11] and the ISCO framework [1]. The use of this LP framework allows the integration of Prolog-like inference mechanisms with classes and inheritance, constraint solving algorithms and provides the connection with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL. This system focus on the questions’ pragmatic analysis, to handle ambiguity, and on an efficient dialogue mechanism, which is able to place relevant questions to clarify the user intentions in a straightforward manner. Proper Nouns resolution and the pp-attachment problem are also handled.
This paper briefly presents this innovative system focusing on its ability to correctly determine the user intention through its dialogue capability.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abreu, S.: Isco: A practical language for heterogeneous information system construction. In: Bartenstein, O., Geske, U., Hannebauer, M., Yoshie, O. (eds.) INAP 2001. LNCS, vol. 2543, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Abreu, S.P., Díaz, D.: Objective: In Minimum Context. In: Palamidessi, C. (ed.) ICLP 2003. LNCS, vol. 2916, pp. 128–147. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Abreu, S.P.: A Logic-Based Information System. In: Pontelli, E., Santos Costa, V. (eds.) PADL 2000. LNCS, vol. 1753, pp. 141–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Androutsopoulos, I.: Interfacing a natural language front-end to a relational database (1992)
Androutsopoulos, I., Ritchie, G.D., Thanisch, P.: Natural language interfaces to databases–an introduction. Journal of Language Engineering 1(1), 29–81 (1995)
Androutsopoulos, I., Ritchie, G.: Database interfaces. In: Moisl, H., Dale, R., Somers, H. (eds.) Handbook of Natural Language Processing, pp. 209–240. Marcel Dekker Inc., New York (2000)
Bick, E.: A Constraint Grammar Based Question Answering System for Portuguese. In: Pires, F.M., Abreu, S.P. (eds.) EPIA 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2902, pp. 414–418. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
De Boni, M.: An analysis of clarification dialogue for question answering
Collins, M., Brooks, J.: Prepositional attachment through a backed-off model. In: Yarovsky, D., Church, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Very Large Corpora, Somerset, New Jersey, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 27–38 (1995)
Development and T. User. The postgresql development team. postgresql user’s guide (1996)
Diaz, D.: (1999), http://www.gnu.org/software/prolog
Ginzburg, J.: Clarifying utterances (1998)
Godinho, J., Quintano, L., Abreu, S.: Universidade de Évora’s Integrated Information System: An Application. In: Dijkman, H., Smulders, P., Cordewener, B., de Belder, K. (eds.) The 9th International Conference of European University Information Systems, Universiteit van Amsterdam, pp. 469–473 (July 2003) ISBN 90-9017079-0
Kamp, H., Reyle, U.: From Discourse to Logic. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1993)
Katz, B., Felshin, S., Yuret, D., Ibrahim, A., Lin, J., Marton, G., McFarland, A., Temelkuran, B.: Omnibase: Uniform access to heterogeneous data for question answering (2002)
Katz, B., Lin, J.J.: Start and beyond
Quintano, L., Abreu, S.P., Pimenta Rodrigues, I.: Relational Information Retrieval through Natural Language Analysis. In: Bartenstein, O., Geske, U., Hannebauer, M., Yoshie, O. (eds.) INAP 2001. LNCS, vol. 2543, pp. 86–99. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Abreu, S.P., Quaresma, P., Quintano, L., Pimenta Rodrigues, I.: A Natural Language Dialogue Manager for Accessing Databases. In: Ranchhod, E., Mamede, N.J. (eds.) PorTAL 2002. LNCS, vol. 2389, p. 161. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Merlo, P.: Generalised pp-attachment disambiguation using corpus-based linguistic diagnostics. In: EACL, pp. 251–258 (2003)
Kautz, H., Etzioni, O., Popescu, A.: Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases. In: Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) (2003)
Voorhees, E.M.: Overview of the TREC 2001 question answering track. In: Text REtrieval Conference (2001)
Warren, D.H.D., Pereira, F.C.N.: An efficient easily adaptable system for interpreting natural language queries. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 8(3-4), 110–122 (1982)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Quintano, L., Rodrigues, I. (2006). Using a Logic Programming Framework to Control Database Query Dialogues in Natural Language. In: Etalle, S., Truszczyński, M. (eds) Logic Programming. ICLP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4079. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11799573_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11799573_30
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-36635-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36636-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)