Title: Building natural language responses from natural language questions in the spatio-temporal context

Authors: Ghada Landoulsi; Khaoula Mahmoudi; Sami Faïz

Addresses: Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Information Systems with Spatial References (LTSIRS), ENIT National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunis El Manar University, El Manar 1, Tunisia ' Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Information Systems with Spatial References (LTSIRS), ENIT National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunis El Manar University, El Manar 1, Tunisia ' Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Information Systems with Spatial References (LTSIRS), ENIT National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunis El Manar University, El Manar 1, Tunisia

Abstract: With the evolving research in geographic information system (GIS) owing to its ability to support decision makers in different fields, there is a strong need to enabling all users; specialists and non-specialists to profit from this technology. Although, the key impediment to non-specialists is the language to interact with the GIS and especially its embedded geographic database (GDB) which require SQL skills. In this paper we explore a new approach which alleviates nomad GIS users from any formatting effort by only using the natural language as a GDB communication mean. The process is generally two-fold: 1) formatting the natural language user query to be processed by the GDB engine; 2) translating the GDB retrieved answer to a text easily interpreted by all GIS users. The resulting implemented system was integrated to the OpenJump GIS and has been evaluated to give satisfactory results.

Keywords: spatio-temporal data; geographic databases; GDBs; question answering systems; structured query language; natural language generation; NLG.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2021.112077

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2021 Vol.14 No.1, pp.1 - 25

Received: 28 Feb 2019
Accepted: 14 Dec 2019

Published online: 04 Jan 2021 *

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