Natural language access to a large data base: an engineering approach
David L. Waltz · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 1975
An intelligent program which accepts natural language queries can allow anon-technical user to easily obtain information from a large non-uniform data base. This paper discusses the design of a program which will tolerate a wide variety of requests including ones with pronouns and referential phrases. The system embodies a certain amount of common sense, so that for example, it knows when it does or does not understand a particular request and it can bypass actual data base search in answering unreasonable requests. The system is conceptually simple and could be easily adapted to other data bases.