Abstract: A system and method for normalizing a discourse representation structure (DRS) are provided. The elements of the structure are rewritten and sorted in a way such that structures which may appear different but are nonetheless equivalent can be associated with the same, normalized representation. Various embodiments can also include a data structure for a DRS. The DRS may be represented by an array of boxes, each having a set of elements which in turn has a predefined structure suitable for representing a wide variety of linguistic information.

Abstract: An authoring tool (or process) to facilitate the performance of an annotation function and an indexing function. The annotation function may generate informational annotations and word annotations to a database design schema (e.g., an entity-relationship diagram or “ERD”). The indexing function may analyze the words of the annotations by classifying the words in accordance with a concordance and dictionary, and assign a normalized weight to each word of each of the annotations based on the classification(s) of the word(s) of the annotation. A query translator (or query translation process) to (i) accept a natural language query from a user interface process, (ii) convert the natural language query to a formal command query (e.g., an SQL query) using the indexed annotations generated by the authoring tool and the database design schema, and (iii) present the formal command query to a database management process for interrogating the relational database.