SEARCH INTERFACE BASED ON NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERY TEMPLATES Sebastian Ryszard Kruk (sebastian.kruk@deri.org), Krystian Samp (krystian.samp@deri.org) Caoimhin O'Nuallain (caoimhin.onuallain@deri.org), Brian Davis (brian.davis@deri.org) Bill McDaniel(bill.mcdaniel@deri.org), Sławomir Grzonkowski(slawomir.grzonkowski@deri.org) National University of Ireland Galway, DERI Galway IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland ABSTRACT The Internet, bursting with different kinds of activities with information being published with every heartbeat around the world is still the major challenge to the information retrieval research. Even Google, the premiere search technology, is not always able to bring the most relevant results to the user. Natural language processing techniques, being still under rapid development, are considered to be a solution for users trying to answer their questions. However, to build a full- fledge NLP system takes time and effort. In this article we present a very lightweight approach to NLP using query templates based on the motivations for building a lightweight query answering system originating from the domain of digital libraries. KEYWORDS information retrieval, natural language querying. 1. INTRODUCTION One of the important aspects of developing services for users is to make sure they will be used. As a means of achieving this we have examined the main motivational features to get users to not only use the system or service once but to continue using and reusing the facility. We describe the motivational characteristics as: • Intuitive interface: The interface must motivate users to engage with the system • Good Feedback: Feedback must be timely and meaningful to the user. • Engaging material: Pedagogically constructed material is more engaging to an audience • Collaboration: Users are encouraged to work together in groups • User driven: User driven curricula aids access and appropriateness to the material. The initial survey we carried out with library staff determined that systems exist to execute simple and complex queries, but the problem would appear to be the lack of user motivation to use the systems in place. This data reflect the situation for first, second third and fourth year students for all domains. Question Answering Transition from query answering to question answering has been already initiated by many search engines like AskJeeves or Yahoo answers. Direct RDF query access is useful when integrating a digital library with other systems. But for the average user direct access is not useful since not many people know RDF query languages. A solution to this problem is natural language interface. However, fully-fledged NLP systems are still a field of major research. Semantic digital libraries can provide controlled vocabulary interfaces or a set of templates matching the most frequent user queries by combining natural language processing techniques with social and semantic information maintained by the digital libraries users can ask questions they were never able to ask (see Fig~\ref{fig:nlq}). This solution is not as sophisticated as fully-fledged NLP. This approach allows the full potential of semantic descriptions and social relations in the social semantic digital library to be used. Methods and Techniques of NLQ