A Natural Language Database Interface Based on a Probabilistic Context Free Grammar

Abstract

This paper presents a natural language interface to relational database. It introduces some classical NLDBI products and their applications and proposes the architecture of a new NLDBI system including its probabilistic context free grammar, the inside and outside probabilities which can be used to construct the parse tree, an algorithm to calculate the probabilities, and the usage of dependency structures and verb subcategorization in analyzing the parse tree. Some experiment results are given to conclude the paper.