Natural Language for Database Queries : A Laboratory Study

Are natural language systems for database queries meetingtheir goals? And, are these goals appropriate? The recentlycompleted Advanced Language Project at New York Universitycombined a field experiment with two laboratory studies toexamine these issues by comparing performance between subjectsusing the formal database language SQL and subjects using theprototype natural language system, USL. This paper describesthe design and results of the larger laboratory experiment.The results presented offer some promise for the usability ofnatural language under certain conditions