We seek to give everyday technical teams the capability to build robust natural language interfaces to their databases, for subsequent use by casual users. We present an approach to the problem which integrates and streamlines earlier work based on light annotation and authoring tools. We model queries in a higher-order version of Codd's tuple calculus and we use synchronous grammars extended with lambda functions to represent semantic grammars. The results of configuration can be applied directly to SQL based databases with general n-ary relations. We have fully implemented our approach and we present initial empirical results for the Geoquery 250 corpus.
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