The goal of this ongoing project is to develop an open agent architecture and accompanying user interface for networked desktop and handheld machines. The system we are building should support distributed execution of a user's requests, interoperabilityofmultiple application subsystems, addition of new agents, and incorporation of existing applications. It should also be transparent; users should not need to know where their requests are being executed, nor how. Finally, in order to facilitate the user's delegating tasks to agents, the architecture will be served byamultimodal interface, including pen, voice, and direct manipulation. Design considerations taken to support this functionality will be discussed below. INTRODUCTION Agents are all the rage. #Visioneering" videos, suchas Apple Computer's Knowledge Navigator, have helped to popularize the notion that programs endowed with agency, if not intelligence, are just around the corner. Soon, users need not themselves...

This paper is an introduction to natural language interfaces to databases (Nlidbs). A brief overview of the history of Nlidbs is first given. Some advantages and disadvantages of Nlidbs are then discussed, comparing Nlidbs to formal query languages, form-based interfaces, and graphical interfaces. An introduction to some of the linguistic problems Nlidbs have to confront follows, for the benefit of readers less familiar with computational linguistics. The discussion then moves on to Nlidb architectures, portability issues, restricted natural language input systems (including menu-based Nlidbs), and Nlidbs with reasoning capabilities. Some less explored areas of Nlidb research are then presented, namely database updates, meta-knowledge questions, temporal questions, and multi-modal Nlidbs. The paper ends with reflections on the current state of the art. 1 Introduction A natural language interface to a database (Nlidb) is a system that allows the user to access information sto...

The need for N a ur a La ngua' Interfa3; to da ta ba ses (NLIs) ha s become increa3] glya cute a more a d more peoplea ccess informa ion through their web browsers, PDAs, a d cell phones.Yet NLIsa re only usa ble if theyma p na tura la gu a. questions to SQL queries correctly As Schneiderma a d Norma ha vea rgued, people a. unwilling to tr a e relia lea nd predicta ble user interfaMM for intelligent but unrelia ble ones In thispa per, we introducea theoretica l fra mework for relia ble NLIs, which is the founda tion for the fully implemented Precise NLI We prove tha t, fora broa cla3 of semantically tractable tura la gu a. questions, Precise is gua.' teed to ma p e a h question to the corresponding SQL query We report on experiments testing Precise on severa l hundred questions dra wn from user studies over three benchma rkda ta ba ses We findtha t over 80% of the questionsa' sem a tica;M traE a ble questions, which Precise a swers correctly lly recognizes the 20% of questions tha t it c a not h a dle, a d requestsa pa ra phra se Fina lly, we show tha t Precise compa res fa vora ly with Mooney'slea: ing NLIa nd with Microsoft 's English Query product Categories and Subject Descriptors H 2 3 [Database Management]: Query L a gua.E3 SQL; H 5 2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfa:M , N a ur a La ngua' General Terms gua:------ Algorithms, Relia ility Keywords tura la gu a. interfa'H da ta ba se, relia ility # We th a k Keith Golden, D a Weld, Bonnie Weber a d Tessa La for comments on previous dra' s Thisresea] h wa s supported in pa' by ONRgra t N00014-02-1-0324 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 prof...

This paper describes techniques for automatic construction of dictionaries for use in large-scale foreign language tutoring (FLT) and interlingual machine translation (MT) systems. The dictionaries are based on a language-independent representation called lexical conceptual structure (LCS). A primary goal of the LCS research is to demonstrate that synonymous verb senses share distributional patterns. In this paper, we show how the syntax-semantics relation can be used to develop a lexical acquisition approach that contributes both toward the enrichment of existing online resources and toward the development of lexicons containing more complete information than is provided in any of these resources alone. We start by describing the structure of the LCS and showing how this representation is used in FLT and MT. We then focus on the problem of building LCS dictionaries for large-scale FLT and MT. First, we describe authoring tools for manual and semi-automatic construction of LCS dictionaries; we then present a more sophisticated approach that uses linguistic techniques for building word defmitions automatically. These techniques have been implemented as part of a set of lexicon-development tools used in the MILT FLT project (Dorr et al., 1995; Sams, 1995; Weinberg et al., 1995) and in the PRINCITRAN MT project (Dorr et al., 1995b).

The thesis describes novel techniques and algorithms for the practical parsing of realistic Natural Language (NL) texts with a wide-coverage unification-based grammar of English. The thesis tackles two of the major problems in this area: firstly, the fact that parsing realistic inputs with such grammars can be computationally very expensive, and secondly, the observation that many analyses are often assigned to an input, only one of which usually forms the basis of the correct interpretation. The thesis starts by presenting a new unification algorithm, justifies why it is well-suited to practical NL parsing, and describes a bottom-up active chart parser which employs this unification algorithm together with several other novel processing and optimisation techniques. Empirical results demonstrate that an implementation of this parser has significantly better practical

We present an intelligent information agent that uses semantic methods and natural language processing capabilites in order to gather tourist information from the WWW and present it to the human user in an intuitive, user-friendly way. Thereby, the information agent is designed such that as background knowledge and linguistic coverage increase, its benefits improve, while it guarantees state-of-the-art information and database retrieval capabilities as its bottom line.

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SRI, with some discussion of experimentation with the software by the other partners. Low-level interfacing issues and a guide to using the system are covered in a manual provided with the final release of the software. The project also involved a study by Cambridge University Computer Laboratory on evaluating natural language processing systems. A digest of the report for this study appears at the end of the present report. CLARE was designed as a natural language processing system with facilities for reasoning and understanding in context and for generating cooperative responses. The work plan for the project required both further development of the Core Language Engine (CLE) natural language processor and the design and implementation of new components for reasoning and response generation. All the milestones set in the project plan were achieved, the final system including the following capabilities: • Wider coverage of English syntax and semantics than the original CLE system. This is quantified in the report.

From the analysis of naturally occurring texts we obtained evidence for the systematic interaction between nominal anaphora and metonymies. This leads us to postulate an integrated model incorporating both phenomena simultaneously. The consideration of discourse constraints for metonymy resolution allows us to challenge the commonly held view that the interpretation of metonymies should proceed from a literal-meaning-first approach. Thus, we argue for an equally balanced treatment of literal and figurative language use.

The thesis describes a logical formalization of natural-language database interfacing. We assume the existence of a "natural language engine" capable of mediating between surface linguistic string and their representations as "literal" logical forms: the focus of interest will be the question of relating "literal" logical forms to representations in terms of primitives meaningful to the underlying database engine. We begin by describing the nature of the problem, and show how a variety of interface functionalities can be considered as instances of a type of formal inference task which we call "Abductive Equivalential Translation" (AET); functionalities which can be reduced to this form include answering questions, responding to commands, reasoning about the completeness of answers, answering meta-questions of type "Do you know...", and generating assertions and questions. In each case, a "linguistic domain theory" (LDT) \Gamma and an input formula F are given, and the goal is to constr...