NALMO: Transforming Queries in Natural Language for Moving Objects Databases

• Published in: GeoInformatica 2023-07, Vol.27 (3), p.427-460
• Main Authors: Wang, Xieyang, Liu, Mengyi, Xu, Jianqiu, Lu, Hua
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Commerce; Computer Science; Data Structures and Information Theory; Design; Geographical Information Systems/Cartography; Information Storage and Retrieval; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Language; Multimedia Information Systems; Natural language; Natural language processing; Object motion; Prototypes; Queries; Query languages; Traffic management; Translating
• ISSN: 1384-6175; 1573-7624
• DOI: 10.1007/s10707-023-00494-5

Moving objects databases (MODs) have been extensively studied due to their wide variety of applications including traffic management, tourist service and mobile commerce. However, queries in natural languages are still not supported in MODs. Since most users are not familiar with structured query languages, it is essentially important to bridge the gap between natural languages and the underlying MODs system commands. Motivated by this, we design a natural language interface for moving objects, named NALMO. In general, we use semantic parsing in combination with a location knowledge base and domain-specific rules to interpret natural language queries. We design a corpus of moving objects queries for model training, which is later used to determine the query type. Extracted entities from parsing are mapped through deterministic rules to perform query composition. NALMO is able to well translate moving objects queries into structured (executable) languages. We support five kinds of queries including time interval queries, range queries, nearest neighbor queries, trajectory similarity queries and join queries. We develop the system in a prototype system SECONDO and evaluate our approach using 280 natural language queries extracted from popular conference and journal papers in the domain of moving objects. Four volunteers give the system satisfaction and related suggestions through three rounds of independent tests. Experimental results show that (i) NALMO achieves accuracy and precision 96.8% and 81.1%, respectively , (ii) the average time cost of translating a query is 1.49s, and (iii) the average satisfaction is 95.5% .