Transportability and Generality in a Natural-Language Interface System

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a transportable natural language (NL) interface to databases and the constraints that transportability places on each component of such a system. By a transportable NL system, the authors mean an NL processing system that is constructed so that a domain expert (rather than an artificial intelligence (AI) or linguistics expert) can move the system to a new application domain. After discussing the general problems presented by transportability, this paper describes TEAM (an acronym for Transportable English database Access Medium), a demonstrable prototype of such a system. The discussion of TEAM shows how domain-independent and domain-dependent information can be separated in the different components of a NL interface system, and presents one method of obtaining domain-specific information from a domain expert.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1983
Accession Number
ADA460623

Entities

People

  • Douglas Appelt
  • Fernando C. Pereira
  • Paul J Martin

Organizations

  • SRI International

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Databases
  • Information Operations
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Languages
  • Transportable
  • West Germany

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Linguistics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation