Exploring Time, Tense and Aspect in Natural Language Database Interfaces

Author
Ion Androutsopoulos | Athens University of Economics and Business
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027249906 (Eur) | EUR 116.00
ISBN 9781588112699 (USA) | USD 174.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027297471 | EUR 116.00 | USD 174.00
 
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Advances in temporal databases make it increasingly easier to store time-dependent information, creating a need for facilities that will help end-users access this information. In the context of natural language interaction, significant effort has been devoted to interfaces that allow database queries to be formulated in natural language. Most of the existing interfaces, however, do not support adequately the notion of time. Drawing upon tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases, this cross-discipline book examines relevant issues from the three areas, developing a unified theoretical framework that can be used to build natural language interfaces to temporal databases. The framework features an HPSG mapping from English to a formally defined meaning representation language, and a corresponding mapping to a temporal extension of the SQL database language. The book is accompanied by a freely available prototype interface, built according to the framework, and implemented using Prolog and ALE. This is the first in-depth exploration of the notion of time in natural language database interfaces. It will be particularly interesting to researchers working on natural language interaction, tense and aspect, HPSG, temporal logics, and temporal databases, especially those who wish to learn about time-related issues in other disciplines.

[Natural Language Processing, 6] 2002.  x, 307 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“This book is explicit and provides a useful resource for researchers and developers of natural language interfaces and temporal databases. The framework addresses difficult problems involved in making natural language queries to temporal databases possible, and together with its prototype interface, it constitutes a foundation from which more complex interfaces may be developed and the value of representing event structure in temporal databases may be explored.”
“The book is true to its name; it explores the issues of time, tense and aspect, keeping NLIDBs [Natural Language Interfaces to Data Bases] as an empirical grounding for an otherwise theoretical discussion. However, the discussion in the book is leading the state of the art in NLIDBs towards more empirical and less exploratory work. Moreover, the book contains clear place-holders for researching issues such as evaluation and cooperative response generation. On that behalf, the book provides a necessary milestone on that worthy path.”
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Abuarrah, Sufyan
2019. Time tells a story. Pragmatics and Society 10:2  pp. 230 ff. DOI logo
Böhlen, Michael, Johann Gamper & Christian S. Jensen
2006. An algebraic framework for temporal attribute characteristics. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 46:3  pp. 349 ff. DOI logo
Han, Benjamin & Alon Lavie
2004. A framework for resolution of time in natural language. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing 3:1  pp. 11 ff. DOI logo
Minock, Michael
2006. Modular Generation of Relational Query Paraphrases. Research on Language and Computation 4:1  pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
van der Aa, Han, Claudio Di Ciccio, Henrik Leopold & Hajo A. Reijers
2019. Extracting Declarative Process Models from Natural Language. In Advanced Information Systems Engineering [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11483],  pp. 365 ff. DOI logo
WONG, KAM-FAI, YUNQING XIA, WENJIE LI & CHUNFA YUAN
2005. An Overview of Temporal Information Extraction. International Journal of Computer Processing of Languages 18:02  pp. 137 ff. DOI logo

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Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2002074690 | Marc record