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 Provably Reliable Question-answering Interfaces
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General
 Reliable NLI Home
Faculty
 Oren Etzioni
 Henry Kautz
 Dan Weld
Students
 Ana-Maria Popescu
 Alexander Yates
UW Natural Language Community
 Mari Ostendorf (EE Dept.)
 Speech Group (EE Dept.)
 Wanda Pratt (Information School)
 John Goldsmith (Linguistics Dept.)
 Eric Brill (Microsoft Research)
   

The need for natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) has become more acute as more nontechnical people access information through their web browsers, PDAs, and cell phones. Yet NLIDBs are only useful if they map natural language questions to SQL queries correctly, and natural language interfaces tend to be error-prone.

The PRECISE Natural Language Interface to Databases is designed on the principle that it should guarantee the correctness of its output, or else indicate that it does not understand the input question. For a certain class of semantically tractable questions, PRECISE is able to recognize a member of that class and guarantee that its SQL output is the correct interpretation of the question.

Publications


CSE logo Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA  98195-2350
(206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX
[comments to amp@cs.washington.edu]