The Berkeley UNIX Consultant Project

  • Authors:

  • Robert Wilensky;David N. Chin;Marc Luria;James Martin;James Mayfield;Dekai Wu

  • Affiliations:

  • Division of Computer Science, Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. (E-mail: wilensky@cs.berkeley.edu);Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii, 1680 East West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, U.S.A. (E-mail: Chin@Hawaii.Edu);NDS Technologies Israel Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel (E-mail: mluria@ndc.co.il);Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0430, U.S.A. (E-mail: martin@cs.colorado.edu);Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Dept., University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21228-5398, U.S.A. (E-mail: mayfield@cs.umbc.edu);Department of Computer Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, P.R. China (E-mail: dekai@cs.ust.hk)

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence Review
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

UC (UNIX Consultant) is an intelligent, natural-language interface thatallows naive users to learn about the UNIX operating system. UC wasundertaken because the task was thought to be both a fertile domain forArtificial Intelligence research and a useful application of AI work inplanning, reasoning, natural language processing, and knowledgerepresentation. The current implementation of UC comprises the followingcomponents: A language analyzer, called ALANA, that produces arepresentation of the content contained in an utterance; aninference component called a concretion mechanism that furtherrefines this content; a goal analyzer, PAGAN, that hypothesizes theplans and goals under which the user is operating; an agent, calledUCEgo, that decides on UC's goals and proposes plans for them; adomain planner, called KIP, that computes a plan to address the user'srequest; an expression mechanism, UCExpress, that determines thecontent to be communicated to the user, and a language productionmechanism, UCGen, that expresses UC's response in English. UC alsocontains a component called KNOME that builds a model of the user'sknowledge state with respect to UNIX. Another mechanism, UCTeacher,allows a user to add knowledge of both English vocabulary and factsabout UNIX to UC's knowledge base. This is done by interacting with theuser in natural language. All these aspects of UC make use of knowledgerepresented in a knowledge representation system called KODIAK. KODIAKis a relation-oriented system that is intended to have widerepresentational range and a clear semantics, while maintaining acognitive appeal. All of UC's knowledge, ranging from its most generalconcepts to the content of a particular utterance, is represented inKODIAK.