Shwartz@YALE.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (07/20/83)
From: Steven Shwartz <Shwartz@YALE.ARPA> The following is a response to the recent letter to the editor of Psychology Today that was circulated on AI-List concerning a natural language system developed by Cognitive Systems Inc. for an oil company. It states that "[the Cognitive Systems program] is friendly as long as you play by its rules and tell it what it expects to hear." The system in question was not designed nor touted to be a general natural language system. It was designed to understand and respond to queries about oil wells and topographical maps, and within its specified domain, it performs extremely well. This system has been demonstrated at several conferences, most recently the Applied Natural Language Conference in Santa Monica (February, 1983), where numerous members of the academic community tested the system and were favorably impressed. It should be noted that the individual who wrote the letter was not employed by either Cognitive Systems or the division of the oil company which commissioned this program. In fact, he was a programmer of the query language that the natural language front end was designed to replace.