U. Samstagschnock et Ct. Meadow, PBS - AN ECONOMICAL NATURAL-LANGUAGE QUERY INTERPRETER, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 44(5), 1993, pp. 265-272
Citations number
12
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Information Science & Library Science
A natural language interface, named PBS, to a bibliographic informatio
n retrieval system, is described, which receives natural language sear
ch statements from an end-user and identifies search facets and implie
d Boolean logic operators. The program is intended for use in conjunct
ion with an intermediary program (OAK) for online database searching,
operating in a user's personal computer. Such a program must be fast a
nd make minimal demands on memory, which places severe restrictions on
storage of dictionaries and thesauri needed for full natural language
interpretation. This initial version deals with a single domain, bibl
iographic files, almost all of which use the same attributes, such as
subject, author, or journal name. The objective of PBS is to identity
terms in a natural language query, classify them by attribute, recogni
ze the boolean logic stated or implied, conflate terms that have minor
spelling variations, and present the terms to the intermediary progra
m, organized by facet or term category. In testing, the main difficult
y resulted from false identification of journal names. Yet, in light o
f the editorial capabilities of OAK, which allow a user to correct a q
uery before it is given to an IRS, PBS can be regarded as a workable n
atural language interface that can alleviate some of the problems inhe
rent in native command languages.