Handling Grammatical Errors, Ambiguity and Impreciseness in GIS Natural Language Queries

A natural language query interface is very desirable for a geographic information system (GIS). It converts natural language queries (sentences) into a formal query language. A key task in building a natural language query interface is handling uncertainty and impreciseness. Grammatical errors and parsing ambiguity cause uncertainty. A natural language query may contain imprecise terms that have to be processed before an executable query can be generated. In this paper, a three–step technique is presented that can be used to correct grammatically incomplete natural language queries, solve parsing ambiguity, and translate imprecise conditions into executable selection conditions.