Conceptual Schema Approach to Natural Language Database Access

Natural language database interfaces require translation knowledge to convert user questions into formal database queries. Previously, translation knowledge acquisition heavily depends on human specialties such as NLP, DBMS and domain engineering, consequently undermining domain portability. This paper attempts to semi-automatically construct translation knowledge by introducing a physically-derived conceptual database schema, and by simplifying translation knowledge into two structures – classreferring documents and classconstraining selection restrictions. Based on these two structures, this paper proposes a noun translation method that employs an information retrieval framework.