A portable natural language interface from Arabic to SQL.

In recent years, natural language interface systems have been built based on
the Front End and the Back End architecture which gives a guarantee of modularity
and portability to the system as a whole. An Arabic Front End has
been built that takes an input sentence, producing syntactic and semantic representations,
which it maps into First Order Logic. Expressing the meaning
of the user's question in terms of high level world concepts makes the natural
language interface independent of the database structure. It is then easier to
port the interface Front End to a database for a different domain.
The syntactic treatments are based on Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar
(GPSG) whereas the semantics are expressed in formal semantics theory. The
focus is mainly to provide syntactic and semantic analyses for Arabic queries
based on correct Arabic linguistic principles. The proposed treatments are
proved and tested by building a prototype system. The prototype is implemented
using one of the existing systems called Squirrel.
An Arabic morphological analyser is also proposed and implemented to distinguish
between two types of morphemes: internal morphemes which are a part
of the word's pattern, and external morphemes which are independent words
attached to the word but which are not part of the word's pattern. So, the
system focuses on the extraction of morphemes from the various inflexions or
forms of any Arabic word.