Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2007
This demonstration showcases the STEP system for natural language access to relational databases.... more This demonstration showcases the STEP system for natural language access to relational databases. In STEP an administrator authors a highly structured semantic grammar through coupling phrasal patterns to elementary expressions within a decidable fragment of tuple relational calculus. The resulting phrasal lexicon serves as a bi-directional grammar, enabling the generation of natural language from tuple relational calculus and the inverse parsing of natural language to tuple calculus. This ability to both understand and generate natural language enables STEP to engage the user in clarification dialogs when the parse of their query is of questionable quality. The STEP system is nearing completion and will soon be field tested in several domains.
In this paper we consider processing of global queries posed over information spaces populated by... more In this paper we consider processing of global queries posed over information spaces populated by information resources that may advertise their contents in terms of global domain-speci c ontologies. We describe a technique to identify what portions of a user's query may not be answered by a set of available information agents. This is achieved by reasoning over the advertisements of the agents relative to the user's query. The technique to solve this problem is based on the realization that the set di erence of the queries q1 and q2 may be computed as a syntactic manipulation of the expressions q1 and q2 for a well de ned subset of the relational algebra over a restricted class of relational schemas. That is to say, one may take the expressions for q1 and q2, apply the query di erence formula to yield q3, and be guaranteed that q3 is logically equivalent to q1 ? q2. With this Query Di erence operator de ned, the ability to compute query intersection, subsumption and equivalence follow. These claims are formally de ned and proven and an example from an on-line movie guide domain is provided.
Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 1996
Cooperative Information Systems let users pose imprecise queries and receive approximate or summa... more Cooperative Information Systems let users pose imprecise queries and receive approximate or summary answers in return. Yet cooperative answers should be accompanied by an explanation of how they were derived. We present an explanation system for the cooperative information system CoBase[1] . The architecture and formalism for this explanation system are the main focus of this report. In addition this report touches on the more general problem of how to interactively refine and extend explanations.
In this paper we consider processing of global queries posed over information spaces populated by... more In this paper we consider processing of global queries posed over information spaces populated by information resources that may advertise their contents in terms of global domain-speci c ontologies. We describe a technique to identify what portions of a user's query may not be answered by a set of available information agents. This is achieved by reasoning over the advertisements of the agents relative to the user's query. The technique to solve this problem is based on the realization that the set di erence of the queries q1 and q2 may be computed as a syntactic manipulation of the expressions q1 and q2 for a well de ned subset of the relational algebra over a restricted class of relational schemas. That is to say, one may take the expressions for q1 and q2, apply the query di erence formula to yield q3, and be guaranteed that q3 is logically equivalent to q1 ? q2. With this Query Di erence operator de ned, the ability to compute query intersection, subsumption and equivalence follow. These claims are formally de ned and proven and an example from an on-line movie guide domain is provided.
We present an Android-based platform for incrementally presenting spoken route directions to guid... more We present an Android-based platform for incrementally presenting spoken route directions to guide pedestrians to destinations. Our approach makes heavy use of stored procedures and triggers in an underlying PostGIS spatial database. In fact most of the 'intelligence' of our prototype resides in database stored procedures and tables. As such it represents an example of a challenging real world case study for the use of persistent stored modules (PSM) in a complex mobility application. It also provides a platform to study performance tradeoffs for complex event processing over spatial data streams.
Research on Language and Computation Formal Issues in Natural Language Generation, Feb 28, 2006
This article proposes a novel technique to generate natural language descriptions for a wide clas... more This article proposes a novel technique to generate natural language descriptions for a wide class of relational database queries. The approach to describing queries is phrasal and is restricted to a class of queries that return only whole schema tuples as answers. Query containment and equivalence are decidable for this class and this property is exploited in the maintenance and use of a phrasal lexicon. The query description mechanism is implemented within the STEP (Schema Tuple Query Processor) system (http://www.cs.umu.se/∼mjm/step).
Systems must become better at explaining the operations they offer, the actions they take, and th... more Systems must become better at explaining the operations they offer, the actions they take, and the results they yield. Currently many systems do this to one degree or another. Word processors and spreadsheets offer simple, selfexplanatory operations and show direct results immediately. Information systems offer custom query forms and data-entry screens and simple answer set presentations or reports. These systems have succeeded in their communication responsibilities by simplifying the set of operations they offer and by presenting the application state graphically in accordance with familiar, intuitive metaphors. Yet in many instances we wish to grant systems broader, more complex responsibilities. Simple communication techniques are insufficient in these cases. If required, such systems must be able to explain themselves [7][11][10][6]. One area in which explanation technology is required is in Cooperative Information Systems[5]. Traditionally database systems accept precise query specification (SQL, Datalog, etc.) and return exact answer sets. In Cooperative Information Systems people pose imprecise queries and receive approximations when answer sets are non-existent and summaries when answer sets are large. Yet these cooperative answers should be accompanied by an explanation of how they were derived. This work addresses the use of explanation technology in the cooperative information system CoBase[1][2][3][8]. CoBase provides approximate and associated answers to a user's relational and object-oriented queries.
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Papers by Michael Minock