  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.
