A Team User’s Guide

Abstract

TEAM (Transportable English Data Access Manager) is a computer system designed to acquire information about a (local or remote) database, and subsequently to interpret and answer questions addressed to the database in a subset of natural language. The system currently includes an interactive program that acquires information about a database from the database administrator. The user is asked how the database is to be structured and what language is to be used to talk about its contents. The program augments the following components of a core natural language access system:

• The lexicon
• The conceptual model of the domain (or conceptual schema)
• The structural model of the database (or database schema)

After these steps have been completed, the system accepts natural-language questions about the database contents and, to the extent it is able, provides relevant responses.