Natural language Interface for Database: A Brief review

Information is playing an important role in our lives. One of the major sources of information is databases. Databases and database technology are having major impact on the growing use of computers. Almost all IT applications are storing and retrieving information from databases. Retrieving information database requires knowledge of database languages like SQL. The Structured Query Language (SQL) norms are been pursued in almost all languages for relational database systems. However, not everybody is able to write SQL queries as they may not be aware of the structure of the database. So this has led to the development of Intelligent Database System ( IDBS) . There is an overwhelming need for non-expert users to query relational databases in their natural language instead of working with the values of the attributes. As a result many intelligent natural language interfaces to databases have been developed, which provides flexible options for manipulating queries. The idea of using Natural Language instead of SQL has prompted the development of new type of processing called Natural language Interface to Database. NLIDB is a step towards the development of intelligent database systems (IDBS) to enhance the users in performing flexible querying in databases. This paper is an introduction to Intelligent Database System and Natural Language Interface to Databases. Then a brief overview of NLIDB subcomponents is given and then discussion then moves on to NLIDB architectures and various approaches for the development of NLIDB systems.