When you talk about tuning, are you saying you'd be unlikely to have time to train the system after initial setup? We're making an iterative model that'll allow you to add new concepts, new sentence structures etc as you go, and we've thought a few times it would be good to expose a log of queries (especially failed ones), and also allow end users to say 'this is wrong/nonsense' whenever they get results.
Time to train wouldn't be the problem, it would be a case of letting you guys near the data. The lawyers would have kittens. Having a nice tuning tools would be a good idea, as it allows us to do it.
Would the thing nock out an AST, or would it be SQL only? As it stands, one of the benefits of our own DSL (using Irony) is that we can implement the AST in T-SQL or just C# code against POCOs.
Also, in my distant C# days I was very impressed with Irony, glad it's still around.
However we wouldn't be able to even disclose some anonymised data, let alone have something communicate with the outside world that was munging our real data. Just the idea from security attack vector stance, effecively allowing any query would be a a deal breaker.
The problem is I can't see much happening in the way of tuning, we would be the clients from asshole land:
Oh yeah when I make a query, I don't get good results back Ok lets have a look, what's the query like Can't tell you that Ok, what's the data like Can't tell you that What can you tell us? System sucks
But obviously if someone else is providing data for tuning the NLP stuff to actually work on our data, if we can run the output as a AST, putting it anywhere we want as we would the output from our DSL, I could imagine the business case for paying a few cents per user, per month.