A procedure automates the process of setting up an instance of a conversational natural language interface for a Web site. By automating the process of setting up a new Web site, the process enables a new interface to be created by anyone. Subsequent manual tuning of the interface is possible and much easier to do than creating an interface from scratch. In order to set up an instance of a natural language conversational interface, it is necessary to define a hierarchy of topics into which individual documents or Web pages can be classified, provide a keyword index for those documents for an associated search engine, and for each node in the hierarchy, specify a mechanism for associating an input natural language (NL) query to the node.