A natural language parser is a program that works out the grammatical structure of sentences, for instance, which groups of words go together (as “phrases”) and which words are the subject or object of a verb.
Dan Klein wrote the original version of this parser and Christopher Manning helped him by his support code and linguistic grammar development.
A Part-Of-Speech Tagger (POS Tagger) is a piece of software that reads text in some language and assigns parts of speech to each word (and other token), such as noun, verb, adjective, etc., although generally computational applications use more fine-grained POS tags like ‘noun-plural’.
Example:-
Query
Tagging
Alphabetical list of part-of-speech tags used :
1. CC Coordinating conjunction 2. CD Cardinal number 3. DT Determiner 4. EX Existential there 5. FW Foreign word 6. IN Preposition or subordinating conjunction 7. JJ Adjective 8. JJR Adjective, comparative 9. JJS Adjective, superlative 10. LS List item marker 11. MD Modal 12. NN Noun, singular or mass 13. NNS Noun, plural 14. NNP Proper noun, singular 15. NNPS Proper noun, plural 16. PDT Predeterminer 17. POS Possessive ending 18. PRP Personal pronoun 19. PRP$ Possessive pronoun 20. RB Adverb 21. RBR Adverb, comparative 22. RBS Adverb, superlative 23. RP Particle 24. SYM Symbol 25. TO to 26. UH Interjection 27. VB Verb, base form 28. VBD Verb, past tense 29. VBG Verb, gerund or present participle 30. VBN Verb, past participle 31. VBP Verb, non-3rd person singular present 32. VBZ Verb, 3rd person singular present 33. WDT Wh-determiner 34. WP Wh-pronoun 35. WP$ Possessive wh-pronoun 36. WRB Wh-adverb
We are categorizing/parsing these queries according to different grammatical phrases which in turn is helping us to easily recognize keywords that we are using to search from database. These keywords are then compared to the lexicons of the database which include the relation names, attributes and values available in the database. The wh-word (query word) defines an operation in an SQL query such as Select and a noun of any form defines a keyword to be searched in the database. The rest of the tokens are used to describe a relation between them defining what the user is actually looking for.