Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app
by TheAnimus on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @08:55AM
(#5361474)
To be honest, I'd rather the security of the query wasn't handled by your thing. My data source shouldn't allower user bob to ever be able to see data that is not intended for him.
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.
Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app
by thom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @10:35AM
(#5362050)
Well, internally we're just passing around bits of lisp before building the query. Part of the aim in gathering data through our survey is to get a feel for what data sources people want, so it's likely we'll have more than just SQL. Given that, I don't see why we could just have a homebrew, abstract structure as well, if not the internal representation.
Also, in my distant C# days I was very impressed with Irony, glad it's still around.
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.