tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Domain-Independent Natural Language Database Access Systems"

Zn the past decade, a number of natural language database access systems have been constructed (. Hendrix 1976; Waltz et e l . 1976; Sacerdoti 1978; Harris 1979; Lehner~ and Shwartz 1982; Shvartz 1982). The level of performance achieved by natural language database access systems varies considerably, with the sore robust systems o p e r a t i n g v i t h t n a narrow domain ( i . e . , content area) and r e l y i n g heavily on domain-specif i c knowledge to guide the language understanding process. Transporting. | Problems With Domain-Independent Natural Language Database Access Systems Steven p. Shwartz Cognitive Systems Inc. 234 Church street New Haven Ct. 06S10 In the past decade a number of natural language database access systeas have been constructed eg. Hendrix 1976 Waltz et al. 1976 Sac-erdoti 1978 Harris 1979 Lehnert and Shwartz 1982 Shwartz 1982 . The level of perforaance achieved by natural language database access systems varies considerably with the more robust systems operating within a narrow domain . content area and relying heavily on domain-specific knowledge to guide the language understanding process. Transporting a system constructed for one domain Into a new domain is extremely resource-intensive because a new set of domain-specific knowledge must be encoded. In order to reduce the cost of transportation a great deal of current research has focussed on building natural language access systems that are domain-Independent. More specifically these systems attempt to use syntactic knowledge in conjunction with knowledge about the structure of the database as a substitute for conceptual knowledge regarding the database content area. In this paper I examine the issue of whether or not it is possible to build a natural language database access system that achieves an acceptable level of performance without including domain-specific conceptual knowledge. A perfomnca critarion rot natural language assess systems The principle motivation for building natural language systems for database access is to free the user from the need for data processing Instruction. A natural language front end is a step above the English-like query systems that presently dominate the commercial database retrieval field. English-like query systems allow the user to phrase requests as English sentences but permit only a restricted subset of English and impose a rigid syntax on user requests. These English-like query systems are easy to learn but a training period is still required .