Interactive Discourse: Looking to the Future 
Panel Chair's Introduction 
Bonnie Lynn Webber 
University of Pennsylvania 
In any technological field, both short-term and long- 
term research can be aided by considering where that 
technology might be ten, twenty, fifty years down the 
pike. In the field of natural language interactive 
systems, a 21 year vision is particularly apt to con- 
sider, since it brings us to the year 2001. One well- 
known vision \[I\] of 2001 includes the famous computer 
named Hal - one offspring, so to speak, of the major 
theoretical and engineering breakthrough in computers 
that Clarke records as having occurred in the early 
1980's. This computer Hal is able to understand and 
converse in perfect idiomatic English (written and 
spoken) with the crew of the spacecraft Discovery. And 
not just task-oriented dialogues, mind you! 
Hal is a far cry from today's prototype natural language 
query systems, intelligent CAl-systems, diagnostic as- 
sistance systems, and Kurzweil machines. For one thing, 
Hal is not Just responsive: he takes the initiative. 
His first documented utterance on board the spacecraft 
Discovery comes at a time when the crewmen Bowman and 
Poole are engrossed in a fading vision screen image of 
Poole's family on Earth, on the occasion of Poole's 
birthday. 
"Sorrv to interrupt the festivities," said Hal~ 
"but we have a problem." 
Not only can Hal converse in perfect idiomatic English, 
but he is a master of problem context (Panel I) and 
social context (Panel 2) as well! 
Now Hal is clearly where we currently are not at, and 
2001 is clearly only one man's vision (albeit a very 
special man). Yet Clarke's depiction of Hal raises sev- 
eral issues, which along with other ones, provide a cue 
for the current panel discussion. The issues include: 
I. Where is it that we want to have, must have, can ex- 
pect to have, or conversely, should not have ~o have, 
Natural Language Interactive Systems? 
2. Barring Clarke's reliance on the triumph of automat- 
ic neural network generation, what are the major hurdles 
that still need to be overcome before Natural Language 
Interactive Systems become practical? 
3. What effects can we expect, deriving from the avail- 
ability of, what to me seem, almost magical developments 
in hardware? 
4. Are there practical (and acceptable) alternatives to 
interacting with machines in natural language in the 
various situations that provide a positive answer to 
question i? 
5. Should we be shooting for spoken Natural Language 
interactions - either input or output or both - or 
should we not, like Clarke, go the whole way and expect 
our machines to read lips as well. 
REFERENCES 
\[. Clarke, Arthur C., 2001: A Space Odyssey, New Ameri- 
can Library, 1968. 
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