A natural language interface for querying general and individual knowledge

Many real-life scenarios require the joint analysis of general knowledge, which includes facts about the world, with individual knowledge, which relates to the opinions or habits of individuals. Recently developed crowd mining platforms, which were designed for such tasks, are a major step towards the solution. However, these platforms require users to specify their information needs in a formal, declarative language, which may be too complicated for naïve users. To make the joint analysis of general and individual knowledge accessible to the public, it is desirable to provide an interface that translates the user questions, posed in natural language (NL), into the formal query languages that crowd mining platforms support. While the translation of NL questions to queries over conventional databases has been studied in previous work, a setting with mixed individual and general knowledge raises unique challenges. In particular, to support the distinct query constructs associated with these two types of knowledge, the NL question must be partitioned and translated using different means; yet eventually all the translated parts should be seamlessly combined to a well-formed query. To account for these challenges, we design and implement a modular translation framework that employs new solutions along with state-of-the art NL parsing tools. The results of our experimental study, involving real user questions on various topics, demonstrate that our framework provides a high-quality translation for many questions that are not handled by previous translation tools.