[drittich]

I remember first playing with tech like this in the early 1990's. Q&A v4 from Symantec supported NLP and I was quite surprised at how potentially useful it looked, although as a developer I preferred more control. After typing your query, the app would display its interpretation of your request in more formal English to confirm it understood you. When there was ambiguity a few options were presented. You selected the correct one, and got your answers. It worked very well for queries like, "show me all employees hired after 2020-01-01 who's salary is greater than 80,000 sorted by salary descending".

Ultimately though, I think the usefulness of these tools breaks down for both complex queries and even simple ones when the data model does not have explicit relationships defined.

[brochington]

1990's huh, wow. I totally believe it. It almost feels like a solved problem, but when I tried to find an API that parsed text to a degree that was usable by an average dev, nothing came up. Many NLP/AI/ML tools could define the entities, or VERY general relationships, but never went far enough. I'm curious if the 90's solutions used ML, or if they went straight to text analysis (which is what I'm using).

> Ultimately though, I think the usefulness of these tools breaks down for both complex queries and even simple ones when the data model does not have explicit relationships defined.

Makes sense. Do you think it would help if a developer could define the relationships in the data model ahead of time?

[getpost]

Symantec Q&A was released in 1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_%28Symantec%29

For various definitions of query, the work goes back to the 1950s https://developer.ibm.com/articles/a-beginners-guide-to-natu...

[brochington]

The Symantec link is fascinating, thank you for that!