Creating database queries by demonstration

Programming by demonstration (PBD) systems offer the advantage of easy programming. However, they have difficulty in inferring user intent behind user actions, because of the ambiguity of those actions. This paper describes a novel approach “action management” to the inference problem. It is based on an idea that PBD systems are able to properly determine user intent by making users demonstrate only non-ambiguous actions. With the action management approach, a PBD system for creating database queries, called DADIE, can correctly infer user intent even in creating complex queries, such as join, group-by and subquery