An ontology based dialog interface to database

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the state-of-the-art NLIDB system and present a dialog interface to relational databases. Dialog interface enables users to automatically exploit the semantic context of the conversation while asking natural language queries over RDBMS, thereby making it simpler to express complex questions in a natural, piece-wise manner. We propose novel ontology-driven techniques for addressing each of the dialog-specific challenges such as coreference resolution, ellipsis resolution, and query disambiguation, and use them in determining the overall intent of the user query. We demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of dialog interface over two different domains viz. finance and healthcare.