The general goal of our research is the creation of a natural and intuitive interface for input and recognition of American Sign Language (ASL) math signs. The specific objective of this work is the development of two new interfaces for the Mathsigner application. Mathsigner is an interactive, 3D animation-based game designed to increase the mathematical skills of deaf children. The program mak...

Effective information retrieval in XML documents requires the user to have good knowledge of document structure and of some formal query language. XML query languages like XPath and XQuery are too complex to be considered for use by end users. We present an approach to XML query processing that supports the specification of both textual and structural constraints in natural language. We impleme...

Increasing attention is being focused on Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Even as IR systems become more powerful, users of such systems encounter great diiculty in using them. This is because there is a conceptual gap between the users' information needs and the representations in IR systems. IR queries are notoriously complex. We propose a model-based solution to this problem. Our implemen...

The PHRED (PHR asal English Diction) generator produces the natural language output of Berkeley's UNIX Consultant system (UC). The generator shares its knowledge base with the language analyzer PHRAN (PHRasal ANalyser). The parser and generator, together a component of UC's user interface, draw from a database of patternconcept pairs where the basic unit of the linguistic patterns is the phrase...

A hot issue in the area of database management is to provide a high level interface for nontechnical users. An important research direction is the application of natural language interface. The paper presents an interface module that converts user’s query given in natural language into a corresponding SQL command. After clustering the input sentence, a pushdown automaton is used to verify the s...

The customization of a natural language interface to a certain application, domain or knowledge base still represents a major effort for end users given the current state-of-the-art. In this article, we present our natural language interface ORAKEL, describe its architecture, design choices and implementation. In particular, we present ORAKEL’s adaptation model which allows users which are not ...

In this paper, I will show how a controlled natural language (CNL) can be used as an interface language to the Semantic Web. Instead of working with a formal language based on RDF that is difficult to write and understand for non-specialists, I will argue that a CNL can be employed to describe resources on the Web (via assertional statements) and to construct ontologies (via terminological stat...