Seminario de Informática ‘Mirian Andrés’

The research is a crossroads in the fields of Informatics and Computational Linguistics and illustrates the understanding and interpretation of texts in natural language by computers. In it, the computer is trained with the help of grammar rules and classified linguistic corpora of possible word combinations of language units.

The research presents an algorithm (a type of methodology) for creating a software module, independent of the programming language and of the query language, which copes with the task of extracting information from a relational database from a freely set user question. The goal can be achieved through pre-built models describing the considered domain area, rules, and question/query templates.

The analytical capability of the proposed algorithm allows the language units identified by the question to be mapped to database objects, information about which can be found and returned in the form of a response from the system. Logical programming methods and processing in the algorithm do not depend on the programming language and technologies used.

The presented method for semantic search and information retrieval can be implemented absolutely independently to different information systems operating in the same domain area. From the experiments made with user questions, it can be concluded that the software tool based on the proposed algorithm copes with the task of transforming natural language text into a database query.