Cited By
View all- Ishikawa HIzumida YYoshino THoshiai TMakinouchi A(1987)KID Designing a Knowledge-Based Natural Language InterfaceIEEE Expert10.1109/MEX.1987.43070652:2(57-71)Online publication date: Jun-1987
Issues in the development of natural language front-ends
Authors: 
James Hendler, 
Thomas P. Kehler, Paul Roller Michaelis, Brian Phillips, Kenneth M. Ross, Harry R. TennantAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 643 - 648
Abstract
This paper will discuss some issues we believe to be important to the design of a natural language front-end. These are divided into three categories: conceptual coverage, linguistic coverage, and implementation issues. The section on conceptual coverage discusses the use of a domain expert, which understands what the user is saying even though the system to which the front-end is interfaced might not be able to properly do what the user wants. The section on linguistic coverage discusses attempts to allow a natural language interface to handle natural, interactive human communication. Two solutions are explored: First, the design of a robust natural-language-understanding system, composed of many experts that know about some aspect of the organization of language, is considered; second, because the design of a robust system is a large task, the intermediate goal of limiting the vocabulary and constructions that can be used while retaining all the user-oriented benefits of natural language is considered. The implementation issues considered are the design of a system in which the grammar and the domain of discourse can be easily extended and which can be used for more than one domain without extensive rewrite.
References
[1]
Birtwistle, Graham M., Dahl, Ole-Johan, Myhrhaug, Bjorn, and Nygaard, Kristen. Simula Begin. Lund, Sweden: Studentlitteratur. 1973.
[2]
Chapanis, A., Parrish, R. N., Ochsman, R. B. and Weeks, G. D. Studies in interactive communication: II. The effects of four communication modes on the linguistic performance of teams during cooperative problem-solving. Human Factors, 1977, 19, 101--126.
[3]
Hewitt, Carl. Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages. A. I. Memo 410. Cambridge, MA: MIT AI Laboratory, 1976.
[4]
Kehler, T. P. and Woods, C. A. ATN Grammar Modelling in Applied Linguistics. ACL 1980 Conference Proceedings.
[5]
Kelly, M. J. and Chapanis, A. Limited vocabulary natural language dialogue. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 1977, 9, 479--501.
[6]
Michaelis, P. R. Cooperative problem solving by like- and mixed-sex teams in a teletypewriter mode with unlimited, self-limited, introduced and anonymous conditions. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1980, 10, 35--36. (Ms. No. 2066)
[7]
Phillips, Brian, and Hendler, James A. The impatient tutor: an integrated language understanding system. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Tokyo, 1980, pp. 480--486.
[8]
Schank, Roger C. Conceptual Information Processing. NY: American Elsevier. 1975.
[9]
Schank, Roger C. and Kolodner, Janet. Retrieving Information from an Episodic Memory, or, Why Computers' Memories Should Be More Like Peoples. Yale University Depart, of Computer Science Research Rpt. 159 1979.
[10]
Sondheimer, Norman K., and Weischedel, Ralph M. A rule based approach to ill-formed input. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Tokyo, 1980, pp. 46--53.
[11]
Tennant, Harry. Evaluation of natural language processors. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Illinois, 1981.
[12]
Thompson, B. H. Linguistic analysis of natural language communication with computers. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Tokyo 1980.
[13]
Waltz, David L. An English language question answering system for a large relational data-base. Comm. ACM 21, 1978, 526--539.
[14]
Weischedel, Ralph M., and Black, John E. Responding intelligently to unparsable inputs. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 6, 1980, 97--109.
[15]
Wilks, Y. A preferential, pattern-seeking, semantics for natural language inference. Artificial Intelligence 6, 1975, 53--74.
- Issues in the development of natural language front-ends
Recommendations
Usable natural language interfaces through menu-based natural language understanding
CHI '83: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsConventional natural language interfaces suffer from several ease-of-use problems. They require a user to type and to formulate questions in a way that the system can understand. They have high failure rates which often frustrate users, and users often ...
The utility of natural language interfaces (panel session)
CHI '85: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsNatural language interfaces are frequently proposed as a solution to the problems of “user-unfriendliness” present in many existing computer system interfaces. The panel will examine this claim, and discuss in what circumstances (if any) it is (or could ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
May 1981
736 pages
ISBN:9781450379212
DOI:10.1145/1500412
Copyright © 1981 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
- AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 04 May 1981
Check for updates
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- View Citations1Total Citations
- 111Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)34
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
Reflects downloads up to 01 Oct 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View all- Ishikawa HIzumida YYoshino THoshiai TMakinouchi A(1987)KID Designing a Knowledge-Based Natural Language InterfaceIEEE Expert10.1109/MEX.1987.43070652:2(57-71)Online publication date: Jun-1987
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in