DATENBANK-DIALOG: A German Language Interface for Relational Databases

Datenbank-DIALOG is a German language interface for relational databases. Its goal is to provide easy and efficient access to the contents of such a database for casual users. The user has only to type in his or her question in plain German and the system will respond properly. This is much easier than using a formal query language and more flexible than a menu-type or graphic interaction. Datenbank-DIALOG was designed to be as portable as possible, in particular with regard to the application domains as well as the database management system and the operating system of the supporting computer. Equally important was good coverage of the subset of German relevant for database retrieval. German was chosen because we feel that at present it is not feasible to design a parser adaptable to different natural languages, at least not in a satisfying manner. As a result of this specialization Datenbank-DIALOG imposes almost no syntactic restrictions on the user, and care has been taken to make the semantic coverage as homogeneous as possible. This is important to make a user who is unaware of the technical realization of both the interface and the database comfortable with the system.