yvonne@gufalet.let.rug.nl (Yvonne Vogelenzang) (07/10/90)
I'm writing a paper about natural language interfaces and I wonder if anyone can tell me more about such interfaces. I'm especially interested in projects after say 1985, since all the literature I can find describes programs that were written before then. So if anyone knows anything about systems that were developed recently, I'd very much like to know this. Please send all the info you have to my email-adress. Thanks!!!!!
poesio@research.att.com (Massimo Poesio) (07/12/90)
The posting that follows is a reply to a recent posting by Yvonne Vogelenzang asking about recent natural language interfaces. I tried to reply via email, but my message bounced. Since the content is of moderately general interest I'll try to followup instead - no reference to the Chinese Room is made, though. REST OF MESSAGE FOLLOWS ---------------------------- What do you mean by natural language interfaces? I'll assume that you are asking about systems which are able to understand natural language questions (and possibly reply in english too). You can find lots of information about recent natural language interfaces in the journal Computational Linguistics, as well as in the proceedings of the ACL; your Computer Science Dept. should have both. Especially useful would be to get the proceedings of the 1988 conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, where lots of systems where discussed. The most famous `recent' systems include: - TEAM, developed at SRI at the beginning of the '80s; its `final' description appeared in Artificial Intelligence Journal, 1987 - UC, still under development at Berkeley, by the group of Wilensky; a description appeared in Computational Linguistics in 1989 or 1988; - The system developed by Kathleen Dahlgren and Michael McCord of IBM: again, a description appeared in Computational Linguistics in 1988 or 1989, plus Kathy had a book in 1987 called `Naive Semantics' which is a great book; - XTRA, under development at University of Saarbruecken; a description appeared in the International Journal of Man Machine Studies; - LILOG, under development at the University of Stuttgart and IBM Germany. - LUCY, under development at MCC by the group of Elaine Rich; Len Schubert, has developed a story understanding system called ECOLOGIC which makes use of GPSG to build a Montague-like representation called Episodic Logic; a description of Episodic Logic will appear in Artificial Intelligence Journal shortly. The group of James Allen at Rochester is developing a discourse understanding system, but the work is still in its beginnings; again, I could tell you more since I am involved in this. Last but not least, one system I have worked on, WISBER, developed by the University of Hamburg, Siemens Munich et al. We had tons of technical reports (available by writing at the Department of Computer Science), plus papers at ECAI, COLING and GWAI. If you are in a hurry, start looking at the first systems I've mentioned, in that order. Hope this helps Massimo Poesio University of Rochester, Dept. of Computer Science Rochester, NY 14620 - USA poesio@cs.rochester.edu (currently at AT&T Bell Labs, 600 Mountain Ave. Murray Hill, NJ 07974 poesio@research.att.com)
yvonne@gufalet.let.rug.nl (Yvonne Vogelenzang) (07/19/90)
Thanks very much to everyone out there who reacted to my request for NLI info. Although there was something wrong with my mailbox, I received most of the messages, some of which were very useful to me. Yvonne
yvonne@gufalet.let.rug.nl (Yvonne Vogelenzang) (07/26/90)
In article <1160@gufalet.let.rug.nl> I wrote: >I'm writing a paper about natural language interfaces and I wonder if anyone >can tell me more about such interfaces. I received some requests from people to summarize the reactions I received, so here it comes: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From: Fabrizio Sebastiani <fabrizio@cs.toronto.edu> One project I know of (I worked there myself) is the CFID project, AKA ESPRIT P527 "Communication Failure In Dialogue". A number of papers have appeared on this project; one of them is in this year's AIMSA conference (the authors are Ferrari,Prodanof, Reilly and Saffiotti), another was in COLING'86 (Ferrari, Reilly). Saffiotti and I wrote a paper (it appears on the Proc. of the 1988 IEEE Conf. on AI Applications) on a knowledge representation language we designed that was tailored to the needs of such an interface. >From: groen@cs.sfu.ca (Chris Groeneboer) McFetridge, P., G. Hall, N. Cercone, and W.S. Luk, "System X: A Portable Natural Lanugage Interface", in: "Proceedings of 7th Biennial Conference of Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence", Edmonton, Alberta, 1988, pp. 30-38 >From: andrew@dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick DGBT/DBR) Whalen, T.E., & Patrick, A.S. (1990). COMODA: A conversation model for database access. BEHAVIOUR & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, 9, 93-110. >From: alex@dutirt2.tudelft.nl (Alexander Vonk) Gazdar, G. & Mellish, C. (1989). "Natural Language Processing in Prolog", Addison-Wesley. Allen, J. (1987). "Natural Language Understanding", Benjamin Cummings. >From: ak@cs.uni-sb.de (Alfred Kobsa) I received a long article from the university of Saarbru"cken, Dept. of computer science, D-6600 Saarbru"cken 11, West-Germany, about XTRA, their Natural Language Access System for Expert Systems. This article contained a lot of references, far too much to put on the net. Here's one: Allgayer, J., K. Harbusch, A Kobsa, C. Reddig, N. Reithinger & D. Schmauks (1989). "XTRA: A Natural-language access system to expert systems", in: Internat. Journal on Man-Machine Studies 31, 161-195 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope I have helped some of you with this summary. Yvonne