But I can take this stand strongly only by being very liberal in defining both "natural language interface" and "database systems". Instead of assuming that the problem is one of using typed English to access and/or update a file or files in a single database system, let us define a spectrum of potential natural language interfaces (limiting that phrase, for the moment, to mean typed English sentences) to various kinds of information systems. At one end of this spectrum is simple, single database query, in which the translation from NL to the db system is quite direct. .
