International Journal of Innovation and Scientific Research ISSN 2351-8014 Vol. 9 No. 2 Sep. 2014, pp. 297-306 © 2014 Innovative Space of Scientific Research Journals http://www.ijisr.issr-journals.org/ Corresponding Author: Umair Shafique 297 A Comprehensive Study on Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Interface to Databases Umair Shafique and Haseeb Qaiser Department of Information Technology, University of Gujrat, Gujrat, Pakistan Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: It was highly desirable for a machine to interact more friendly with the users so that the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) emerged and Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDBs) systems are built and design. A major problem faced by the users of the data bases is that the databases generally make use of special purpose languages familiar only to the trained users like Structured Query Language (SQL). Natural Language Interface to Databases provides the interface in which queries are written in the form Natural Language. These queries are passed through the machine, machine translates these queries. There are different levels of it, after passing these levels machine produce relevant results. This paper will provides comprehensive understanding about Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Interface to Databases. KEYWORDS: Machine Translation, Semantic, Pattern, Query, Lexical, Linguistic. 1 INTRODUCTION Natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) is the branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Natural Language processing is becoming most active technique in Human-Computer Interaction [1] and it is also be the branch of Artificial Intelligence [2]. The purpose of NLP research is to create such environment in which database usage does not require any programming skills and need little or no prior training. In comparison of Natural Language Interfaces other user interfaces are less natural to interact. In their databases management systems quires are written in the form of complex language like SQL, SPARQL etc which is difficult for the causal and non-technical users that limits the access to the databases whereas a Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs) helps the users to enhance their performance by providing them the access to the information stored in a database naturally and conveniently. The users can perform flexible and easy queries that are expressed in some natural language and get the answer in the same language (e.g. English). For this purpose there are different techniques that are used e.g. semantic grammar that interleaves semantic and syntactic processing, pattern matching and syntactic grammar. The purpose and the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive knowledge about NLP and NLIDBs, different levels of NLP and approaches and techniques which are used, NLIDBs history, development and future. 2 NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Natural Language Processing is the area of research and application of different computational techniques for processing, understanding and manipulating the input and output to the system in human like natural language and this is also the main goal of it. It is the subset of both linguistics and computer science. Mainly Natural Language Processing is the branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that used for different domain like machine translation, information retrieval and expert systems etc.