A Sinhala Natural Language Interface for Querying Databases Using Natural Language Processing

In this paper, the author presents SinSQLFinder, a Sinhala natural language user interface for generating SQL queries. Data is the heart of the decision-making process in every business, every organization, every government office. But at the same time working with data stored in the databases require special technical skills like Structured Query Language (SQL). It is an identical problem that the non-technical people are facing difficulties while retrieving data from the databases. In Sri Lanka, the native language of the majority of people is Sinhala and a considerable amount of e-governance applications use relational databases. Therefore, to manipulate data from such database applications easily, non-technical users who are more confident with the Sinhala language, need a solution to agree with a simple sentence in Sinhala and generate a valid SQL query. Nevertheless, the main goal of this research has been to establish a strong link between the Sinhala language and structured query language. Because of the language’s complexity, a unique method was developed to translate Sinhala language questions into structured query languages.