Transition network grammars for natural language analysis
Communications of the ACM
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A system called PLANES (for Programmed LANguage-Based Enquiry System) is under development at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory [1,2]. The primary objective of PLANES is to allow a non-programmer to obtain information from a large data base with minimal prior training or experience. Such a system must understand a substantial degree of a user's natural language and guide and educate him to formulate requests in a form that the system can comprehend. The system must handle complex syntactic structures, abbreviations, pronoun reference and ellipsis. The system must also give back explicit answers and not just retrieve a file. Minor errors - such as spelling and grammatical errors - should be tolerated. The system should be interactive and on-line, provide clarifying dialogues, operate fairly rapidly, and should be relatively easy to extend.