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<Paper uid="A92-1038">
  <Title>Datenbank-DIALOG and the Relevance of Habitability</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The paper focusses on the issue of habitability and how it is accounted for in Datenbank-DIALOG 1. Examples from the area of comparisons and measures--both ilnportant for many application domains and non-trivial from a linguistic point of view--demonstrate how design strategies can SUl)port the development of a habitahle system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Datenbank-DIALOG is a German language interface to relational databases. Since the development of a first prototype (1985-88) it has been tested in different enviromnents and continually been improved. Currently, in a large field test, Datenbank-DIALOG interfaces to a database about AI research in Austria. Questions sent by einail 2 are answered automatically.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The system consists of four main components. The scanner breaks up the natural language query into tokens for morphological analysis. The parser l)erforms syntactic and semantic analysis creating one or--in case of ambiguities--more caseframes containing the query representation at the domain level. The interpretation of the query is performed in three stages. The mapping from domain-level to database-level predicates results in a DB-Caseframe, then a linearization step produces the Logical Form and finally a syntactic transformation leads to an SQL query. The answer is then given directly by the DBMS as the result of executing the SQL query.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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