A Robust Natural Language Interface for Access to Bibliographic Databases

摘要

With information readily available over the Internet, easy-to-use search engines become more and more important when looking for specific contents. Natural language information retrieval has a long history and is now in use in many modern information services. This paper describes a new semantically based approach for the transformation of natural language expressions into database queries for different retrieval languages. The natural language interface NLI-Z39.50 implements this approach and provides a user-friendly access to local or remote databases using the standardized Internet protocol Z39.50. Special techniques to add robustness to the NLI-Z39.50 are presented, too.