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<Paper uid="P84-1014">
  <Title>Interaction of Knowledge Sources in a Portable Natural Language Interface</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="58" end_page="58" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The general approach we have taken to defining the inter-component interactions in DATALOG has led to a high degree of extendability. We have been able to add new sub-networks to the grammar without making any changes in the semantic interpreter, producing correct interpretations (and correct answers from the database) on the first try. We have also been able to implement new general semantic processes without modifying the grammar, taking advantage of the &amp;quot;conceptual factoring&amp;quot; \[14\] which is one of the benefits of the Cascaded ATN approach.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The use of a two-level semantic model is an experimental approach that further adds to the portability of a Cascaded ATN grammar. By representing application concepts in an &amp;quot;epistemological&amp;quot; s~m~ntic network with a restricted set of primitive links (see Brao~un \[4\]), the task of building a new application of DATALOG is reduced to defining the nodes and connectivity of this network and the synonyms for the concepts repre-Which female Ph.D.s earn more than 40000 dollars female ' male Ph.D. masters earn  sented by the nodes. Martin et. al. \[12\] define a transportable NL interface as one that can acquire a new domain model by interacting with a human database expert. Although DATALOG does not yet have such a capability, the two-level semantic model provides a foundation for it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> DATALOG is still under active development, and current research activities are focused on two problem areas: extending the two-level semantic model to handle more complex databases, and integrating a pragmatic component for handling anaphora and other dialogue-level phenomena into the Cascaded ATN grammar.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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