Natural language (NL) interfaces for database query formulation have always been recognized as a much needed enhancement for end-users. Poor performances with earlier NL systems had led to a lull in research in this field. However, latter-day experiments and systems appear to be sufficiently more promising to warrant continued and further research in this area. This paper proposes an experimental query interface that filters NL query statements for search predicates that are derived from constructs on conceptual schemas, thereby avoiding the computational difficulty with full-fledged NL parsing. A prototype of the Conceptual Query Language (CQL) exists as a front-end to an Oracle relational DBMS.
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