Functional Representation of Query Sentences and Meaning Determination of Elliptical Sentences

A dialogue model is provided to describe the contents of a dialogue process between a user and a database management system. This model can be· used as an intermediate representation between query sentences in a natural language and the underlying database query language. It is also. capable of keeping the dialogue information, including user query sentences and the associated responses, for later processing of elliptical sentences. A query sentence is decomposed into two components, a query phrase and a data description phrase. The functional representations of both components are analyzed in detail. Five types of representations for elliptical sentences, including subsetting, ordinal, remaining, projection, and substitution, are presented. We also detailedly discuss the determination of full meanings of elliptical sentences based on both the dialogue convention and functional representations.