Natural Language Interfaces to Databases: Simple Tips Towards Usability

Natural Language Interfaces to Databases can be an easy way to obtain information: the user simply has to write a question in his/her own language to get the desired answer. Nevertheless, these kind of applications also present some problems. Many of those arise from the fact that who develops the interface does it according with his/her own idea of usability, which is sometimes far from the real interaction the interface will have to support; but even when a question is syntactically supported, it can be misunderstood and a wrong answer can be provided to the user. In this paper we present some simple tips that intend to minimize these situations.