Natural language interface

This article describes TEAM, a transportable natural-language interface system. TEAM was constructed to test the feasibility of building a natural-language system that could be adapted to interface with new databases by users who are not experts in natural-language processing. An overview of the system design is presented, emphasizing those choices that were imposed by the demands of transportability. Several general problems of natural-language processing that were faced in constructing the system are discussed, including quantifier scoping, various pragmatic issues, and verb acquisition. TEAM is compared with several other transportable systems; this comparison includes a discussion of the range of natural language handled by each as well as a description of the approach taken to achieving transportability in each system.

FLEX a user interface to relational databases, can be used satisfactorily by users with different levels of expertise. FLEX is based on a formal query language, but is tolerant of incorrect input. It never rejects queries; instead, it adapts flexibility and transparently to ...

The inevitable proliferation of expert systems underscores the need for robust, friendly interfaces requiring minimal user training. The objective of the XCALIBUR project is to meet this need by providing natural comprehension and generation in the context of a focused ...

The Royal Institute Elcano (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The work described in this paper aims at improving access to the content. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language interface, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute.

An adaptive parser responds to unfamiliar utterances by augmenting the grammar with rules that will permit the same utterance to be parsed the next time it is encoun-tered. The kind of grammatical components that the system learns are idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntactic structure. ...

The genitive relation is one of the most complex semantic structures, since it could express wide range of different connection types between entities, even in a single language. Thus, transformation of its syntactic form to a formal computer language is far from clear. In the last decade, several natural language database interfaces (NLIDBs) have been proposed, however, a detailed or a general description of this problem is still missing in the literature. In this paper, we present a general solution for translating genitive phrases into SQL queries which contains both language dependent and language independent parts. Our solution is optimized and tested for Hungarian, however, most of the work can be easily adopted for other languages as well.

This paper presents CoCo, a system that automates web tasks on a user's behalf through an interactive conversational interface. Given a short command such as" get road conditions for highway 88," CoCo synthesizes a plan to accomplish the task, executes it on the web, extracts an informative response, and returns the result to the user as a snippet of text. A novel aspect of our approach is that we leverage a repository of previously recorded web scripts and the user's personal web browsing history to determine how to complete ...

System-initiated digressive proposals may be used to introduce new and unexpected information into automated telephone services. These digressions may be viewed as particularly pronounced forms of unsolicited interruptions as they contain information not directly related to the caller's intended activity. In human-human conversation, interruptions are considered to be speech acts which intrinsically threaten both the positive and negative face wants of the addressee and conversants adopt specific verbal strategies to mitigate the negative impact of their interruptions. A question therefore arises whether the introduction of faceredressive expressions, based on human-human conversational strategies, into the design of system-initiated proposals in automated services can mitigate the negative impact of the interruptions. A usability experiment was conducted to examine the effectiveness of three contrasting politeness strategies for system-initiated digressions in a mass-market tel...