Interpretation of Natural Language Queries for Relational Database Access with Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a proposal to derive formal language queries from natural language queries with a combinatory categorial grammar (CCG). CCGs are well known to provide a means of deriving all the levels of information for natural language, i.e., syntax, semantics and discourse, at the same time. In our proposal, we utilize an extra level of representation for formal language queries for the aforementioned derivation. The syntactic coverage is shown with various natural language queries, including compound nouns, modification markers, various types of ellipses, numerical expressions, and subordinate and coordinate constructions. The general purpose CCG lexicon is semi-automatically augmented with the database fields and entries. We also discuss the performance of an implemented natural language query processing system.