Abstract:

The need for intuitive and effective user interfaces to databases become more and more crucial due to the steady growth and availability of Web-based information systems. The past three decades witnessed an increased interest in Human Language Technology. One of the research areas where Human Language Technology played a significant role is the area of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases. A natural language interface to a database provides an easy channel of communication with computer systems. However, most of the work in this area was done in English and other Indo-European languages. Work in Arabic was very limited. This can be attributed to the scarce language resources in Arabic and the fact that Arabic is a very challenging language for computer analysis. This paper discusses the design of an Arabic Web-based natural language interface to a relational database. The initial results of our work are very encouraging and we highly believe that our approach will open the door to extensive research in Arabic language processing.