Abstract

A system for interactively generating a natural-language input interface, without any computer-skill programming work being required. The natural-language menu interface thus generated provides a menu-selection technique whereby a totally unskilled computer user, who need not even be able to type, can access a relational or hierarchical database, without any possibility of error. That is, the user addresses commands to the database system simply by selecting words from an appropriate menu of words which could legally follow in commands, so that the user inputs commands which are phrased entirely in English, and these commands cannot be misunderstood by the database system. The present invention provides an automatic interactive system whereby such an interface is constructed. The database is itself loaded in, and the interactive interface-construction system then addresses a series of queries to the user's technical expert, in response to which the user must classify, which tables in the database are to be used, which attributes of particular tables in the database are key attributes, and, in particular, what the various connections between tables in the database are and what natural-language connecting phrases will describe those relations.