A Novel Solution for the Aggregation Problem in Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB)

• Alexandre Ferreira Novello Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3881-9866
• Marco Antonio Casanova Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0765-9636

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbbd.2020.13644

Resumo

Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB) systems usually do not deal with aggregations, which can be of two types: aggregation functions (such as count, sum, average, minimum, and maximum) and grouping functions (GROUP BY). This paper addresses the creation of a generic module, to be used in NLIDB systems, that allows such systems to perform queries with aggregations, on the condition that the query results the NLIDB returns are or can be transformed into tables. The paper covers aggregations with specificities, such as ambiguities, timescale differences, aggregations in multiple attributes, the use of superlative adjectives, basic unit measure recognition, and aggregations in attributes with compound names.

Palavras-chave: Natural Language Interface to Database (NLIDB), Question Answering (QA), Databases, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Aggregation, SQL

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