English

NLP-SIR: A Natural Language Approach for Spreadsheet Information Retrieval

Software Engineering 2009-08-11 v1 Human-Computer Interaction Information Retrieval

Abstract

Spreadsheets are a ubiquitous software tool, used for a wide variety of tasks such as financial modelling, statistical analysis and inventory management. Extracting meaningful information from such data can be a difficult task, especially for novice users unfamiliar with the advanced data processing features of many spreadsheet applications. We believe that through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques this task can be made considerably easier. This paper introduces NLP-SIR, a Natural language interface for spreadsheet information retrieval. The results of a recent evaluation which compared NLP-SIR with existing Information retrieval tools are also outlined. This evaluation has shown that NLP-SIR is a more effective method of spreadsheet information retrieval.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0908.1193,
  title  = {NLP-SIR: A Natural Language Approach for Spreadsheet Information Retrieval},
  author = {Derek Flood and Kevin Mc Daid and Fergal Mc Caffery},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.1193},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

12 Pages, 2 Colour Figures, 3 Tables