Natural Language Interfaces To Databases: An Analysis Of The State Of The Art

People constantly make decisions based on information, most of which is stored in databases. Accessing this information requires the use of query languages to databases such as SQL. In order to avoid the difficulty of using these languages for users who are not computing experts, Natural Language Interfaces for Databases (NLIDB) have been developed, which permit to query databases through queries formulated in natural language. Although since the 60s many NLIDBs have been developed, their performance has not been satisfactory, there still remain very difficult problems that have not been solved by NLIDB technology, and there does not yet exist a standardized method of evaluation that permits to compare the performance of different NLIDBs. This chapter presents an analysis of NLIDBs, which includes their classification, techniques, advantages, disadvantages, and a proposal for a proper evaluation of them.