An English language question answering system for a large relational database
Communications of the ACM
Interactive consulting via natural language
Communications of the ACM
Basics of Online Searching
IR-NLI: an expert natural language interface to online data bases
ANLC '83 Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing
Taking the initiative in natural language data base interactions: justifying why
COLING '82 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
The use of production systems in RITA to construct personal computer "agents"
ACM SIGART Bulletin
Utterance and objective: issues in natural language communication
IJCAI'79 Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
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Constructing natural language interfaces to computer systems often requires achievement of advanced reasoning and expert capabilities in addition to basic natural language understanding. In this paper the above issue is tackled in the frame of an actual application concerning the design of a natural language interface for interactive document retrieval. After a short discussion of the peculiarities of this application, which requires both natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities, the general architecture and fundamental design criteria of a system presently being developed at the University of Udine are presented. The system, named IR-NLI, is aimed at allowing non-technical users to directly access through natural language the services offered by online databases. Attention is later focused on the basic functions of IR-NLI, namely understanding, dialogue and reasoning. An example of interaction with IR-NLI is fully worked out to introduce the main features of the system. Knowledge representation methods and algorithms adopted are then illustrated. Perspectives and direction for future research are also discussed.