Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges

The volume of natural language text data has been rapidly increasing over the past two decades, due to factors such as the growth of the Web, the low cost associated to publishing and the progress on the digitization of printed texts. This growth combined with the proliferation of natural language systems for search and retrieving information provides tremendous opportunities for studying some of the areas where database systems and natural language processing systems overlap. This tutorial explores two more relevant areas of overlap to the database community: (1) managing natural language text data in a relational database, and (2) developing natural language interfaces to databases. The tutorial presents state-of-the-art methods, related systems, research opportunities and challenges covering both areas.