Intranet Mediator Clement Yu Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Chicago

A simple Query in natural language Collaborative databases can be text or relational databases possibly with form interfaces Answer the query using some of the databases

QUERY Intranet Mediator DBMS1DBMS2DBMSm …

Environment An organization having numerous services Users want to utilize these services, but are unaware of their existence/how to access those services

Query: When did Peter Smith borrow a textbook which costs more than $60? Numerous databases: Academic standing of students; Student social activities; Research activities of faculty members; Health services Library service … Which databases can answer the query?

Distance (Database, Query) For each database, construct a schema graph For the given query, extract query terms Associate the query terms to the database schema graphs Compute a distance between each database graph and the query terms The database with the least distance from the query is the most likely database to answer the query

When, Peter Smith, borrow, textbook, $60, costs

Research issues Necessary and sufficient conditions that the least distance database is in fact a correct database to answer the given query Mapping from natural language query to a relational query or a keyword based query Automatic construction of ontology Multiple databases, including text databases, necessary to answer the query Internet vs Intranet

Keyword-based Search to a Single Database –Sanjay Agrawal, Surajit Chaudhuri, Gautam Das: DBXplorer: A System for Keyword-Based Search over Relational Databases. ICDE 2002 –Gaurav Bhalotia, Arvind Hulgeri, Charuta Nakhe, Soumen Chakrabarti, S. Sudarshan: Keyword Searching and Browsing in Databases using BANKS. ICDE 2002 –Vagelis Hristidis, Yannis Papakonstantinou: DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases. VLDB 2002 NLI to a Single Database –Ion Androutsopoulos, G. Ritchie, and P. Thanisch: Natural Language Interfaces to Databases - An Introduction. Journal of Natural Language Engineering 1995 –Ana-Maria Popescu, Oren Etzioni, Henry A. Kautz: Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases. Intelligent User Interfaces 2003

NLI to a Single Database (Cont.) –Frank Meng and Wesley W. Chu: Database query formation from natural language using semantic modeling and statistical keyword meaning disambiguation. CSD-TR , UCLA, 1999 –L. Tang and R. Mooney Using multiple clause constructors in inductive logic programming, European Conference on Machine Learning,2001. Mediator –David A. Grossman, Steven M. Beitzel, Eric C. Jensen, Ophir Frieder: The IIT Intranet Mediator: Bringing Data Together on a Corporate Intranet. IEEE IT PRO, January/February –Alon Y. Levy, Anand Rajaraman, Joann J. Ordille: Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using Source Descriptions. VLDB 1996 Ontology –Jiawei Han, Yongjian Fu: Dynamic Generation and Refinement of Concept Hierarchies for Knowledge Discovery in Databases. KDD Workshop 1994 –George A. Miller. WordNet: A lexical database for English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 1995