NaLIX: An Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML Yunyao Li, Huahai Yang, and H. V. Jagadish   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Group 2 Demonstrations Abstract Database query languages can be intimidating to the non-expert, leading to the immense recent popularity for keyword based search in spite of its significant limitations. The holy grail has been the development of a natural language query interface. We present NaLIX, a generic interactive natural language query interface to an XML database. Our system can accept an arbitrary English language sentence as query input, which can include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression that can be evaluated against an XML database. The trans- lation is done through mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens to proximity of correspond- ing elements in the result XML. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIX, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to han- dle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed features in NaLIX facilitate the interactive query process and improve the usability of the interface. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery