SCADA-NLI: A Natural Language Query and Control Interface for Distributed Systems

Abstract

Human–Computer natural language interaction is helpful to reduce the operation and maintenance cost of the SCADA system, and it is necessary to solve the complex natural language interface problem that supports data query and real-time control. According to the complexity of natural language instructions, a hierarchical classification of semantic parsing algorithm is adopted. Firstly, the KWECS method is used to classify the intent of natural language instruction, then the TF-IDF keyword extraction algorithm combined with the cosine similarity is used to structure the key-value of the classified natural language instructions which was used into SCADA control intermediate language and then formally converted into actual control or query instruction. If the analysis fails, the complex control and query instruction analysis are carried out according to the classification results, structuring instruction parsing based on dependency parsing and SQL natural language parsing based on deep learning are adopted respectively to implement real-time control interface and database query interface. Our experimental results show that the proposed hierarchical classification of natural language comprehensive query and control interface can better solve the problem of human-computer natural language interaction in the SCADA system, and the accuracy of intent recognition reaches 96.5%. In more detail, the accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score of instruction parsing reach 88.47%, 90.21%, 89.48%, and 89.72% respectively. Especially, it provides more convenient interactive means for industrial and agricultural information management and control.