Toward a Cooperative Natural Language Query Interface for Biological Databases

One of the many unique features of biological databases is that the mere existence of a ground data item is not always a precondition for a query response. From a biologist´s standpoint, queries are not always best posed using a structured language. By this we mean that approximate and flexible responses to natural language like queries are well suited for this domain. This is partly due to biologists´ tendency to seek simpler interfaces and partly due to the fact that questions in biology involve numerous high level concepts that are open to interpretations computed using sophisticated tools. In such highly interpretive environments, rigidly structured databases do not always perform well. In this paper, our goal is to propose a semantic correspondence plug-in to aid natural language query processing over arbitrary biological database schema with an aim to providing cooperative responses to queries tailored to users´ interpretations. We demonstrate the feasibility of our system with a practical example.