Rapid porting of the Parlance natural language interface
Madeleine Bates · 1989
Developing knowledge bases for AI systems takes too long and costs too much. Even a "portable" system may be expensive to use because its installation takes a long time or requires the labor of scarce, highly-trained people. BBN has recently created a tool for acquisition which dramatically reduces the time and cost of installing a natural language system.During 1988, BBN used its Learner™ tool to configure the Parlance™ database interface to two different versions of a large Navy database. The configuration process was performed primarily with development versions of the Learner, which is a software tool for creating the knowledge bases, vocabulary, and mappings to the database that enable the Parlance interface to understand questions addressed to a particular database. The Learner reduced the time required to create Parlance configurations from months to weeks, and demonstrated that the Learner works effectively on databases with many hundreds of fields.