Ontology-aware dynamically adaptable free-form natural language agent interface for querying databases

Studying the literature, one can see a large number of systems that provide natural language interfaces to databases. Despite their importance, these interfaces address only one part of the problem: transforming natural language queries to SQL queries and perhaps executing them against the underlying database. To truly handle the problem, it should be possible to develop dynamically adaptable database interfaces that can (1) adjust their functional behavior on the fly using only domain knowledge and (2) dynamically bind themselves to arbitrary databases and interface with them with no (or very little) human intervention. In particular, the interfaces should have a fixed process (algorithms and codes) and rely only on domain knowledge for adapting their functionality to any arbitrary database. This paper addresses this problem by offering a free-form natural language interface agent that, given domain ontologies, can bind itself to a target database and provide a natural language interface to it. The agent system uses its ontologies to establish mappings on-the-fly between a specific domain ontology and the underlying database’s metadata, and then to transform free-form natural language queries to formal SQL queries that can execute against the underlying database. The preliminary simulations using our proof-of-concept prototype showed that our system successfully attached itself to databases and achieved high recall and precision in transforming natural language queries to formal ones.