Natural language interface

This paper presents a manned-vehicle/unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) mission system that enables an operator in a manned aircraft to issue mission level commands to an autonomous aircraft in real time. A natural language interface allows the manned and unmanned vehicle to communicate in languages understood by both agents. A task scheduler transforms the commands into a dynamic mission plan consisting of task waypoints. These are then given to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)-based ...

Most existing natural language database interfaces (NLDBs) were designed to be used with database systems that provide very limited facilities for manipulating time-dependent data, and they do not support adequately temporal linguistic mechanisms (verb tenses, temporal adverbials, temporal subordinate clauses, etc.). The database community is becoming increasingly interested in temporal database systems, that are intended to store and manipulate in a principled manner information not only about the present, but also about the past and future. When interfacing to temporal databases, supporting temporal linguistic mechanisms becomes crucial. We present a framework for constructing natural language interfaces for temporal databases (NLTDBs), that draws on research in tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases. The framework consists of a temporal intermediate representation language, called TOP, an HPSG grammar that maps a wide range of questions involving temporal mechanisms to appropriate TOP expressions, and a provably correct method for translating from TOP to TSQL2, TSQL2 being a recently proposed temporal extension of the SQL database language. This framework was employed to implement a prototype NLTDB using ALE and Prolog.

This paper present the treatment of prepositions and conjunctions in natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) that allows better translation of queries expressed in natural language into formal languages. Prepositions and conjunctions weren’t sufficiently studied for their usage in NLIDBs, because most of the NLIDBs just look for keywords in the sentences and focus their analysis on nouns and verbs getting rid of auxiliary words in the query. This paper shows that prepositions and conjunctions can be represented as operations using formal set theory. Additionally, since prepositions and conjunctions keep their meaning in any context, their treatment is domain independent. In our experiments we used Spanish language. We validate our approach using two databases; Northwind and Pubs of SQL Server, with a corpus of 198 different queries for the first one and 70 queries for the second one. The 84% of queries were translated correctly for the database Northwind and 80% for Pubs.

Depending on a content-based spatio-temporal video data model, a natural language interface is implemented to query the video data. The queries, which are given as English sentences, are parsed using Link Parser, and the semantic representations of given queries are extracted from their syntactic structures using information extraction techniques. At the last step, the extracted semantic representations are used to call the related parts of the underlying spatio-temporal video data model to get the results of the queries.

A multifunctional NLP environment, ETAP-3 linguistic processor, is presented. The environment, largely based on the Meaning Text Theory, offers several NLP applications, including a machine translation system, a module of synonymous paraphrasing of sentences, a tagger for syntactic annotation of text corpora, a Universal Networking Language interface, a computer-assisted language learning tool, a natural language interface to SQL type databases,

As an alternative to dominant cognitive-constructivist approaches to educational technology, this article makes the case for what has been termed a discursive, or postcognitive, psychological research paradigm. It does so by adapting discursive psychological analyses of conversational activity to the study of educational technology use. It applies these modified techniques specifically to discursive interactions with chatbots or intelligent agents, and to the theories commonly associated with them. In doing so, it presents a critique of ...

The development of robots capable of accepting instructions in terms of familiar concepts to the user is still a challenge. For these robots to emerge it's essential the development of natural language interfaces, since this is regarded as the only interface acceptable for a machine which expected to have a high level of interactivity with Man. Our group has been involved for several years in the development of a mobile intelligent robot, named Carl, designed having in mind such tasks as serving food in a reception or acting ...

This short paper describes a systems biology software tool that can engage in a dialogue with a biologist by responding to questions posed to it in English (or another natural language) regarding the behavior of a complex biological system, and by suggesting a set of “facts” about the biological system based on a timetested “generate and test” approach. Thus, this bioinformatics system improves the quality of the interaction that a biologist can have with a system built on rigorous mathematical modeling, but without ...

This paper presents CoCo, a system that automates web tasks on a user's behalf through an interactive conversational interface. Given a short command such as" get road conditions for highway 88," CoCo synthesizes a plan to accomplish the task, executes it on the web, extracts an informative response, and returns the result to the user as a snippet of text. A novel aspect of our approach is that we leverage a repository of previously recorded web scripts and the user's personal web browsing history to determine how to complete ...

Abstract: Semantic Web technologies allow for a simplified way to represent machine perishable knowledge over Web and have significant implications in extending Web capabilities beyond our current imagination. However, in order to bring its unprecedented power to Web ...