Series:

Synthesis Lectures on Data Management

2 total works

Cover of Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces
The volume of natural language text data has been rapidly increasing over the past two decades, due to factors such as the growth of the Web, the low cost associated with publishing, and the progress on the digitization of printed texts. This growth combined with the proliferation of natural language systems for search and retrieving information provides tremendous opportunities for studying some of the areas where database systems and natural language processing systems overlap.

This book explores two interrelated and important areas of overlap: (1) managing natural language data and (2) developing natural language interfaces to databases. It presents relevant concepts and research questions, state-of-the-art methods, related systems, and research opportunities and challenges covering both areas. Relevant topics discussed on natural language data management include data models, data sources, queries, storage and indexing, and transforming natural language text. Under natural language interfaces, it presents the anatomy of these interfaces to databases, the challenges related to query understanding and query translation, and relevant aspects of user interactions. Each of the challenges is covered in a systematic way: first starting with a quick overview of the topics, followed by a comprehensive view of recent techniques that have been proposed to address the challenge along with illustrative examples. It also reviews some notable systems in details in terms of how they address different challenges and their contributions. Finally, it discusses open challenges and opportunities for natural language management and interfaces.

The goal of this book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in managing natural language data and building natural language interfaces to databases. It serves as a starting point for readers who are interested in pursuing additional work on these exciting topics in both academic and industrial environments.

Cover of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
This book presents a comprehensive overview of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs), an indispensable tool in the ever-expanding realm of data-driven exploration and decision making. After first demonstrating the importance of the field using an interactive ChatGPT session, the book explores the remarkable progress and general challenges faced with real-world deployment of NLIDBs. It goes on to provide readers with a holistic understanding of the intricate anatomy, essential components, and mechanisms underlying NLIDBs and how to build them. Key concepts in representing, querying, and processing structured data as well as approaches for optimizing user queries are established for the reader before their application in NLIDBs is explored. The book discusses text to data through early relevant work on semantic parsing and meaning representation before turning to cutting-edge advancements in how NLIDBs are empowered to comprehend and interpret human languages. Various evaluation methodologies, metrics, datasets and benchmarks that play a pivotal role in assessing the effectiveness of mapping natural language queries to formal queries in a database and the overall performance of a system are explored. The book then covers data to text, where formal representations of structured data are transformed into coherent and contextually relevant human-readable narratives. It closes with an exploration of the challenges and opportunities related to interactivity and its corresponding techniques for each dimension, such as instances of conversational NLIDBs and multi-modal NLIDBs where user input is beyond natural language. This book provides a balanced mixture of theoretical insights, practical knowledge, and real-world applications that will be an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, and students eager to explore the fundamental concepts of NLIDBs.