How to parse natural language question for geoquery program? - nlp

Question

I found the geoquery program that can answer some simple questions, but I can't find any demo or instructions of how to process questions.
So my question is how can I get this:
[what,is,the,shortest,river,?]
into this:
answer(A,shortest(A,river(A))).
Moreover, how is that process done?

Answer 1

In SWI-Prolog, there is something you should try:
?- pack_install(chat80).
...
?- edit(library(chat80)).
It's a revived edition of the CHAT-80 system.
There you will find both the parser and the processor to answer your queries.

Answer 2

Two answers:
It's complex!
Use a library to generate a data structure from the question string (I have not tried that ever).
Here is comment I put up on the SWI Prolog doc site. It may be of some help.
Start with an overview:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-linguistics/
In a recent heavy textbook:
Introduction to Natural Language Processing
by Jacob Eisenstein, 2019
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-natural-language-processing
the author goes far beyond "NLP and Parsing" (indeed the part on
Formal Language Theory, Context-Free Parsing, Dependency Parsing is
only 80 pages of 450) and throws statistics and neural networks at the
problem.
Prolog related works by reverse year of publication
An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog
by Pierre M. Nugues, 2nd edition, 2014
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F3-540-34336-9
"An Outline of Theories, Implementation, and Application with Special Consideration of English, French, and German"
Contains an intro to Prolog, specifically SWI-Prolog.
Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog
by Patrick Blackburn and Kristina Striegnitz, 2002
http://cs.union.edu/~striegnk/courses/nlp-with-prolog/html/index.html
Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis
by Fernando C. N. Pereira and Stuart M. Shieber, (Original 1987, Millenial reissue 2002)
http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf

Answer 3

So my question is how can I get this:
[what,is,the,shortest,river,?]
into this:
answer(A,shortest(A,river(A))).
The research at the University of Texas (over 2005-2009) is in Machine learning: Learning what the Geobase program does (published in 1988). The Prolog programs and data downloaded allows you to query its internal DB, in Prolog. The semantic parser which maps english queries into logic queries (which can be executed by the said programs) is missing.
The program comes with 2 sets of data pairs (250 and 880 pairs) of English queries and logic queries. This data is used for research in machine learning.
So if the user types in the preparsed query, you can use the geoquery program to retrieve the logic query, run the logic query and get the results.
Moreover, how is that process done?
That is called semantic parsing. Since Alain Colmerauer's work in 1972 producing a QA application Orbis on an astronomy db, the Chat80 system in 1980, etc.
I recommend these books by Prof. Covington (taught at the University of Georgia)
NLP for Prloog Programmers (1994)
Prolog Programming in Depth (1997)
Available free from his site, these books will help you go a long way into NLP.