The volume of natural language text data has been rapidly increasing over the past two decades, due to factors such as the growth of the Web, the low cost associated with publishing, and the progress on the digitization of printed texts. This growth combined with the proliferation of natural language systems for search and retrieving information provides tremendous opportunities for studying some of the areas where database systems and natural language processing systems overlap. This book explores two interrelated and important areas of overlap: (1) managing natural language data and (2) developing natural language interfaces to databases. It presents relevant concepts and research questions, state-of-the-art methods, related systems, and research opportunities and challenges covering both areas. Relevant topics discussed on natural language data management include data models, data sources, queries, storage and indexing, and transforming natural language text. Under natural language interfaces, it presents the anatomy of these interfaces to databases, the challenges related to query understanding and query translation, and relevant aspects of user interactions. Each of the challenges is covered in a systematic way: first starting with a quick overview of the topics, followed by a comprehensive view of recent techniques that have been proposed to address the challenge along with illustrative examples. It also reviews some notable systems in details in terms of how they address different challenges and their contributions. Finally, it discusses open challenges and opportunities for natural language management and interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in managing natural language data and building natural language interfaces to databases. It serves as a starting point for readers who are interested in pursuing additional work on these exciting topics in both academic and industrial environments. Contents......Page 4 Preface......Page 7 Introduction......Page 9 Part-of-Speech Tagging......Page 12 Morphological Analysis......Page 13 Syntactic & Dependency Parsing......Page 14 Semantic Parsing......Page 15 Question Answering......Page 17 Dialog System......Page 18 Overview......Page 21 Data Sources......Page 23 Mapping Content to More Formal Models......Page 24 Boolean Keyword Queries......Page 26 Text Pattern Queries......Page 27 Tree Pattern Queries......Page 29 Summary......Page 30 Indexing for Text Pattern Queries......Page 31 Indexing for Tree Pattern Queries......Page 34 Transforming Natural Language Text......Page 38 Meaning Representation......Page 39 Meaning of Words......Page 41 Computing Word Semantics......Page 44 Meaning of Sentences......Page 46 Information Extraction......Page 48 Entity Linking......Page 49 Summary and Discussions......Page 50 Summary......Page 52 Anatomy......Page 53 Challenges......Page 54 Query Understanding......Page 55 Scope......Page 56 Stateless vs. Stateful......Page 57 Parser Error Handling......Page 60 Query Translation......Page 61 Bridging the Semantic Gap......Page 62 Query Construction......Page 69 User Interaction Models......Page 72 Notable Systems......Page 73 PRECISE......Page 74 NLPQC......Page 77 NaLIX......Page 79 FREyA......Page 85 NaLIR......Page 88 NL2CM......Page 90 ATHANA......Page 93 SQLizer......Page 100 Seq2SQL......Page 104 Summary......Page 107 Relationship to Semantic Parsing......Page 108 Summary......Page 111 Understanding NL Text & Queries......Page 112 Evaluation......Page 113 Conclusions......Page 115 Biblio......Page 116 Index......Page 133 Explores two interrelated and important areas: managing natural language data and developing natural language interfaces to databases. The book presents relevant concepts and research questions, state-of-the-art methods, related systems, and research opportunities and challenges covering both areas.
