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<Paper uid="P82-1008">
  <Title>Prince, E. \[1982\] &amp;quot;The Simple Futurate: Not Simply Progrsslve Futurate Minus Progressive,&amp;quot;</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="48" end_page="49" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
Vl MULTIFILE QUERIES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> over which the Join must be made possess compatible values). Two basic problems arise in coordinating information from multiple files: (i) determining the relationships among the domains corresponding to the different fields; (2) accounting for the composition of relations across files.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is relatively straightforward to achieve correctness in (I) even in a transportable system. The composition of relations that are introduced by Joins over distinct files presents greater difficulties because natural-language queries may refer only implicitly to the composition. I want to consider two such cases: (I) the use of a field value (or a synonym) to modify a noun phrase (e.g., &amp;quot;Italian ships&amp;quot;), and (2) the use of a field value as a head noun referring to entities possessing that value for the attribute represented by the field (e.g., in a database about cars, &amp;quot;Fords&amp;quot; might refer to those cars with manufacturermFORD).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In both cases, it may be ambiguous as to exactly what relationship is being expressed. If we restrict natural-language interface systems to handling only isolated queries, the DBE can be asked to eliminate certain of these ambiguities by establishing which fields have values that can be used to modify (or stand alone for) the entities in the database. Thus, for example, a DBE might establish that &amp;quot;Italian ships&amp;quot; will never be used to refer to ships with a port of departure in Italy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Once discourse contexts are taken into account, the problem becomes more difficult. For any field, it is fairly easy to create a context in which the relation represented by that field can be implicitly expressed by using one of its values as a modifier. For example, following the query &amp;quot;Are there more ships sailing from Italy or France this month?&amp;quot;, the query &amp;quot;What cargoes are the Itallan ships carrying?&amp;quot; uses &amp;quot;Italian ships&amp;quot; to refer specifically to ships departing from Italy.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="48" end_page="49" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Vll Acknowledgments
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Robert Moore and Bonnie Webber provided many helpful comments on the content and form of this paper. Many of the ideas in it have resulted from discussions among the members of the TEAM project at SRI. The TEAM project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-80-C-0645 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> I will address only those aspects of this problem that are directly concerned with interpreting natural-language queries correctly, and not those that are concerned primarily with database access (e.g., ensuring that the fields</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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