pam@SU-WHITNEY.ARPA (Premla Nangia) (05/08/86)
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM Speaker: C. Raymond Perrault SRI International and CSLI Title: A Strategy for Developing Natural Language Interfaces to Software Systems Time: Tuesday, May 27, 1986 --- 4:15 p.m. Place: Skilling Auditorium Refreshments: 3rd floor Lounge, Margaret Jacks Hall --- 3:45 p.m. The commonly accepted perspective on the semantics of natural language interfaces is that they are derived from the semantics of the underlying software, e.g. a database. Although there appear to be computational advantages to this position, it limits the linguistic coverage of the interface and presents severe obstacles to their systematic construction by confusing meaningful queries with answerable ones. We suggest instead that interfaces be constructed by first defining the semantics of the underlying software in terms of those of the interface language and give criteria under which some of the computational advantage of the meaningfulness-answerability confusion can be acceptably regained.