Natural Language Processing for Spreadsheet Information Retrieval

Spreadsheets can be used for a variety of tasks including inventory management. Most spreadsheet applications provide the ability to extract additional information from this data, through techniques such as filtering and PivotTables. These techniques however can be quite complex and time consuming, especially for novice spreadsheet users. We believe that these issues can be addressed through the use of Natural Language Processing, a technology that has already demonstrated its effectiveness in similar domains, such as databases and chart generation.