INTERPRETER OF NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERIES

This paper describes the structures adopted for representing the syntactic and semantic knowledge sources in a system which interprets queries in natural language issued against a relational data base. The syntax is represented as a partitioned set of pattern-action rules, whereas the semantic knowledge is inserted in form of network into the lexicon; this latter is accessed by semantic check procedures associated with the slots of frames which are instantiated to build the final representation. A particular attention will be paid to the explanation of the way these knowledge sources interact during the analysis of the command in order to avoid independent translation steps and intermediate representations of the command.