[Tycho]

At university I studied 'natural language interfaces to databases' (NLIDBs). I recall that very early, I think in the 60, NASA and other organisations were trying to build things like this for their scientists. Of course, there was no SQL in those days. Once SQL rose to prominence, my impression is that NLIDB interest faded, especially with the lack of NLP breakthroughs. My project was to create an analog to SQL in more plain, naturalistic English (a bit like what AppleScript is to other programming languages), and then let the user construct the queries by using a GUI rather than free-typing. The GUI would constrain the query text to permissible syntax, letting the user click to add new clauses and select columns etc, while maintaining a 'layman intelligible' sentence. Anyway, maybe now we can get NLIDBs with true NLP.