Abstract. We seek to give everyday technical teams the capability to
build robust natural language interfaces to their databases, for subse-
quent use by casual users. We present an approach to the problem which
integrates and streamlines earlier work based on light annotation and
authoring tools. We model queries in a higher-order version of Codd’s
tuple calculus and we use synchronous grammars extended with lambda
functions to represent semantic grammars. The results of configuration
can be applied directly to SQL based databases with general n-ary re-
lations. We have fully implemented our approach and we present initial
empirical results for the Geoquery 250 corpus.
1 Introduction