Transportability and generality in a natural-language interface system
Paul C. Martin, Douglas E. Appelt, Fernando M. B. Pereira · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1983
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.