Providing help in a natural language query interface to relational databases

The aim of this paper is to present a possible help prototype for IBM SAA LanguageAccess-a natural language query interface to relational databases. The role of help is to assist the user in formulating queries. It is done by extracting and presenting information, syntactic and semantic, about natural language terms and the concepts behind them from a conceptual schema which links the natural language to tables in a particular database. The presented help functions have been prototyped using IBM Prolog.